GEORGE ELIOT 

AND 

THOMAS HARDY 

A CONTRAST 

BY 

UNA WRIGHT BERLE 




NEW YORK 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 

MCMXVII 






COPYRIGHT 191 7 BY 
MITCHELL KENNERLEY 






^ 



PRINTED IN AMERICA 

NOV 21 1917 

@Ct . 77667 



To My Parents 
The First Fruits op Their Love and Toil 



CONTENTS 

ChAPTBB I FA a* 

Rational Idealism 1 

Chapter II 
Hardy and the Scientific Spirit 23 

Chapter III 
Weak Sisters 45 

Chapter IV 
"Her Infinite Variety" 66 

Chapter V 
Men of Straw 91 

Chapter VI 
"The Silver Iterance" 111 

Chapter VII 
The Increment of Years 131 

Chapter VIII 
Radical and Reactionary 153 



Attractive editions of the principal works of George Eliot are 
published in Everyman's Library by E. P. Dutton & Company, 
and in The World's Classics by The Oxford University Press, 
New York. 



GEORGE ELIOT AND 
THOMAS HARDY 

i 

RATIONAL IDEALISM 

ARDENT souls, ready to construct 
their coming lives, are apt to commit 
themselves to the fulfilment of their own vi- 
sions," wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch. 
This anxiety to realize an ideal is one of the 
greatest motive forces in the world; wisely 
directed, it makes possible great reforms and 
lasting achievements, but without a rational 
foundation it degenerates into an aimless un- 
rest which is doomed to futility. Under the 
formative influence of the nineteenth century 
this idealism has abolished slavery and re- 
formed prisons ; it has developed hospitals and 

improved sanitation; it has fostered the social 

1 



2 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

sciences, and ministered to the needs of its 
less favored contemporaries on a scale never 
before possible in the world's history. A great 
humanitarian impulse, coincident with great 
material development, has opened the way for 
tremendous, and almost ?un,believable, ad- 
vances. - 

But with these unquestioned improvements 
there have come the corresponding drawbacks 
of various sorts. Perhaps the plainest evi- 
dence of these lies in the change which has af- 
fected the realm of speculative thought, and 
literature in so far as it reflects that thought. 
Formerly the attention of the people was fixed 
on a social group which stood above them. In 
the days when learning was the possession of 
the few, the learned class took this position of 
preeminence. In one way and another the 
emphasis has shifted. We no longer look at a 
class which we expect to contribute to our de- 
velopment, but at a group to whose ascent we 
hope to give material assistance. Our attitude 
is none the less aristocratic for all this ; we can- 



RATIONAL IDEALISM 6 

not make parade of our increasing democracy 
of spirit ; what has happened is merely that we 
believe ourselves the aristocrats, instead of 
looking to others for this distinction. In our 
pride of emergence, we assume a tone of pa- 
tronage which is in itself a sign of imperfect 
education. 

In literature the development is peculiarly 
striking. From the classical insistence upon 
themes of high and lofty import, we have gone 
to the opposite extreme. A modern poet, John 
Masefield, in the prelude to a volume of Salt- 
Water Ballads,, defines the province in which 
his main interest lies with precision, clearness, 
and poetry withal: 

Not of the princes and prelates with peri- 
wigged charioteers, 

Riding triumphantly laurelled, to lap the fat 
of the years, 

Rather the scorned, the rejected, the men 
hemmed in by the spears. . . . 

Of the maimed, of the halt, and the blind in 
the rain and the cold, 

Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales 
be told. 



4 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

Masefield is not alone in his preference for 
this stratum of society. In the mistaken ef- 
fort to democratize literature and thought, 
we have fastened our attention upon our so- 
cial and intellectual inferiors. This is legiti- 
mate enough ; but before embarking upon such 
a course the danger should be clearly faced — 
that of assimilating those very traits which 
we wish to eradicate. This is the more dan- 
gerous in those whose privilege it is to lead 
their generation. 

A disquieting feature of the new humani- 
tarianism is the tendency to devote the best of 
its artistic effort to the interpretation of the 
injurious or degenerating elements in our civil- 
ization. Oscar Wilde, with The Picture of 
Dorian Grey and The Ballad of Reading 
Gaol, occurs at once as a pertinent example 
of a few years ago; Mr. Percival Pollard, in 
his Masks and Minstrels of New Germany, 
gives examples and criticism of another phase 
of the same outgrowth of our civilization. 
These interpretations are not written in any 
corrective or satiric spirit, under which guise 



RATIONAL IDEALISM O 

the dramatists of the Restoration used to jus- 
tify their brutal representations; it is part of 
what purports to be an impartial presentment 
of life as it actually is. With such an im- 
partial picture we have no proper quarrel ; but 
it is seldom that this can be conducted in a 
strictly scientific spirit. It is argued that the 
portrait must be sympathetic to be accurate. 
From sympathy the next step is to interpreta- 
tion of hidden motives, and finally to justifica- 
tion of them. In literature we have Tess of 
the D'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, Faith- 
fully Presented, In criminology it takes the 
form of the view of the offender as the victim 
of disease; in education it is identified with 
the conception of the child as the product of 
an unalterable heredity, or environment, or 
both. Whatever the field, the tendency is in- 
variably the same. We must place the re- 
sponsibility for existing facts of personality 
on conditions arising from this disjointed 
frame of things, not by any conspiracy upon 
the human creature himself. 

It is a curious paradox that this negation of 



6 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

individual dignity should run parallel with a 
complete practical individualism. Never were 
men less bound by convention than now. The 
reason may be that in feeling themselves so 
thoroughly fettered by laws into which they 
have only a partial insight, — if, indeed, that 
is permitted them, — they believe themselves 
thereby emancipated from all share in either 
the triumphs or the failures of a universe run 
on principles of scientific management by an 
impersonal Bureau of Vital Statistics, and ac- 
cordingly obliged to consider nothing beyond 
their own desires. 

Of this form of exaggerated humanitarian- 
ism Thomas Hardy is in a certain sense the 
typical exponent. He preaches at once an in- 
dividualism unbounded in its scope, because 
unlimited by other than hedonistic considera- 
tions, and a social philosophy whose key-stone 
is the broadest charity for even the most loath- 
some excesses. From being in a measure a 
pioneer in this field of literature, for his work 
began while "Victorianism" was still rampant, 
he has become a commonplace among modern 



RATIONAL IDEALISM 7 

propagandists. This way madness lies. We 
may fairly ask with Matthew Arnold : 

Is there no life save this alone? 
Madman or slave, must man be one? 

The direct question is whether it is possible 
to look at those things which lie on a lower 
level justly, sympathetically, and frankly, 
without being tainted by them, as a result 
of our over-zealous humanitarianism. 

Fortunately, there is a rational idealism. 
There have always been some who would not 
bow the knee to Baal, however great the pro- 
vocation; who refused to allow euphemism to 
obscure actuality, or to dignify mediocrity in 
the name of democracy. Perhaps the sanest 
representative of this tradition in literature is 
George Eliot, herself a humanitarian of the hu- 
manitarians, a woman who w T as willing to take 
the radical position in a crisis rather than aban- 
don a principle to convention. 

Humanitarian zeal in George Eliot is quali- 
fied by a strong recognition of the need for 
standards and criteria whereby to make ef- 



8 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

fective the attempted reforms. As a result, 
though her sympathies are catholic, she never 
allows them to blunt her perception of the 
wider values involved. There is no question 
of obscuring sin under the name of misfor- 
tune, or of disguising wrongdoing under the 
sanction of necessity or expediency. This 
makes for the delineation of a society far more 
easy to live in than that in which each infringe- 
ment of the moral law or social convention 
must instantly bear its burden of explanation, 
interpretation, and justification. The reader 
is relieved from the horrible fear that his nat- 
ural disapprobations may have led him into the 
unpardonable sin of purely conventional cen- 
sure. 

In addition, there is this to be remembered 
in contrasting the humanitarianism of George 
Eliot with that of later writers. Her point of 
view is one which never loses sight of the fact 
that humanity, liable to err as it is, will be di- 
vided in its error only by the nature of its op- 
portunity. Given equal means, its sins and re- 
sistances will be much the same. Clear as she 



RATIONAL IDEALISM 9 

is in her perception of the degrees of moral 
stature, she is never so bigoted as to intimate 
a superiority impossible to the people of whom 
she writes, as the moderns not infrequently do. 
Her pictures of degeneration, of weakness and 
wrong, of moral obliquity, are all so delicately 
tuned to the actual conditions of life that we, in 
contemplating them, are forced to admit, in 
whatever phraseology best suits ourselves, 
"There, but for the grace of God, goes John 
Bunyan." 

On the whole, such a position as this is an 
excellent one for us to find ourselves in. It 
is altogether too easy for us to fall into the 
position which Charles Lamb voluntarily pre- 
ferred in the drama, and to say of the literature 
of our day, and its moral or non-moral values : 

I confess for myself that (with no great de- 
linquencies to answer for) I am glad for a 
season to take an airing beyond the diocese of 
strict conscience, not to live always within the 
precincts of the law-courts, — but now and then, 
for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world 
with no meddling restrictions — to get into re- 



10 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

cesses whither the hunter cannot follow me 
... I come back to my cage and my restraint 
the fresher and more healthy for it. 

The slight difference between our point of 
view and this is that whereas Lamb loves to es- 
cape from the cage of actuality, we take pleas- 
ure in the plunge into what seems to us the 
prison of life as it really is. Whereas Lamb 
loved to create for himself an illusory world 
in which moral judgments were unnecessary, 
we love to lower ourselves into a world where 
also moral judgments are, for one reason or 
another, superfluous, — in which we revel in 
the degradation of our lives. 

This we do in the name of reality. We have 
waked to the consciousness that the old world 
of romance and chivalry, of Arden and Illyria 
and Verona, of Robin Hood and Henry of 
Navarre, Joan of Arc and Beatrice Cenci, was 
only a child's world, "such stuff as dreams are 
made of." What we have achieved in its place 
is not realism, but a bitter travesty of it, a 
grotesque and absurd fidelity to the mechani- 



RATIONAL IDEALISM 11 

cal facts of life, without the corresponding 
recognition of the spiritual values which are 
equally a part of it. There are still those who 
perceive that life is not the sordid thing which 
passes as such in these studies. To readers 
fully conscious of this, George Eliot appears 
as at once realist and artist, — one who pre- 
sents not only the truth, but the illusion of 
truth as well. There is a sober satisfaction in 
her novels such as the modernists rarely give, 
unless as a conscious reversion to an older type. 
For the older novelist was not hampered by a 
public which demanded journalistic terseness 
of him; if he wished to introduce an incident 
of pure characterization, he felt free to do so, 
without the fear that by so doing he would in- 
terrupt the closeness of contact between author 
and reader. His selection of material followed 
artistic lines, rather than the arbitrary regula- 
tions of space and copy. 

Even on his own ground, that of presenting 
the much sought-after "cross-section of life," 
the modern critic must admit that George El- 
iot has fairly met him. Indeed, the accuracy 



12 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

and minuteness of her achievements are sur- 
prising. Sometimes, it must be admitted, this 
happens to the detriment of the artistic effect. 
Such a novel as Middlemarch, for example, 
owes its chief value to this. A small provincial 
town, wherein dwell representatives of all 
classes, independently existing, and brought 
into contact with each other only by the merest 
accident of daily life, offers scope for a social 
study such as we are fond of contemplating. A 
present-day novelist would doubtless limit his 
field still more decisively, as indeed has been 
done by a German of the new school, to the 
small group living in a single tenement. 

The society which George Eliot depicts is 
wide enough in its range to include representa- 
tives of nearly all classes, particularly those 
habitually included in the so-called reading 
public. The majority of her readers belong 
largely to the class which she best understands, 
— educated, intelligent, and safely removed 
from any extreme. In her characterization 
she has the further advantage of the setting in 
which her action normally lies. If we except 



RATIONAL IDEALISM 13 

Romola, in which she attempts to reproduce 
a past civilization, there is no novel which does 
not take place under the most usual conditions 
of English life. 

On such a basis we may develop a rational 
idealism, — one which, while acknowledging 
facts, recognizes also the relation of the spirit- 
ual elements in life to the grosser material 
forces. Of course we must remember the point 
which Emerson drove home with such direct- 
ness: "I can reason down or deny everything 
except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and 
will, and I cannot make him respectable." In 
all idealistic theory and practice we must take 
into account this fundamental physical ne- 
cessity. Yet there is something beyond, which 
produces as valuable factors in any civilization 
as the material ones. "There are so many 
tender and holy emotions flying about in our 
inward world," wrote Jean Paul, "which, like 
angels, can never assume the body of an out- 
ward act; so many rich and lovely flowers 
spring up which bear no seed, that it is a hap- 
piness poetry was invented, which receives into 



14s GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

its limbus all these incorporeal spirits, and the 
perfume of all these flowers." To conserve 
these elements, there is necessary something 
more far-reaching in our civilization and its 
literature than the understanding of common- 
places and brutalities. 

For it remains true that literature is the 
most powerful instrument for preserving these 
flowers of the spirit. Philosophy is too re- 
mote from the bulk of our life to have the in- 
fluence of which it is capable. Music has not 
the definiteness which is needful to the fullest 
expression. The written word, for all its in- 
adequacy, is still the best medium through 
which to communicate both the sense and the 
sentiment of our ideals. 

"Ardent souls, ready to construct their com- 
ing lives, are apt to commit themselves to the 
fulfilment of their own visions," And there- 
fore it is essential that their visions should be 
perpetuated and strengthened by a literature 
in which a sane realism neither ignores nor mag- 
nifies the sordid elements in even the most per- 
fectly regulated civilization. It is a curious 



RATIONAL IDEALISM 15 

fact that there are always the two strands in 
literature, — always distinct, frequently inter- 
woven and overlapping, yet constantly recog- 
nizable, — the one concerned with the repre- 
sentation of the higher, the other with the 
lower phases of life. In the drama the separa- 
tion has been peculiarly marked, until the mod- 
ern introduction of the play which cannot be 
classified either as comedy or tragedy, or un- 
der .any one of the subdivisions by which we 
attempt the task of defining the various aspects 
of human history. The drama of the Restora- 
tion, for example, with its strained and impos- 
sibly idealistic tragedy closely paralleled by 
its witty and grossly sensual realistic comedy, 
is a fair illustration of the combination of the 
two threads at a given time. In the same way 
the two tendencies are shown in the novels of a 
slightly later period. The mawkish sentiment 
of Richardson is accompanied by the full- 
blooded, unreflecting realism of Fielding. In 
the nineteenth century the romantic sympathy 
and revolutionary enthusiasm of Shelley and 
Wordsworth degenerate into a discontented 



16 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

protest against life as it is, or a passive acqui- 
escence in its imperfections. Matthew Arnold, 
with all his excellences, is, so far as his poetry 
is concerned, an example of the former, and 
Oscar Wilde the apotheosis of the latter atti- 
tude. 

With the actual fulfilment of these visions 
literature can have but little to do. Sometimes, 
of course, a book deals with a particular sub- 
ject at a time of such widely diffused feeling 
regarding it, that it brings about the imme- 
diate completion of an impending reform, and 
is therefore credited with being the immediate 
cause of the advance. This was true of Un- 
cle Tom's Cabin, of Bleak House, and of 
Oliver Twist. Special circumstances in re- 
gard to the time which produced them have 
often given to books a reputation for humani- 
tarian achievement to which no intrinsic merit 
entitles them. As a rule the most that litera- 
ture can do is to stimulate effort along spe- 
cial lines of its own choosing. 

George Eliot stands in a central position be- 
tween the two streams. Not only is she in 



RATIONAL IDEALISM 17 

sympathy with those who are anxious to see 
all and judge leniently yet justly, but also she 
recognizes the fallacy of allowing the critical 
faculties to lapse in the interest of interpreta- 
tion. She shows, as do few of the moderns, 
a careful sense of the due proportions to be ob- 
served in all social philosophy. How this is 
accomplished will be shown in succeeding chap- 
ters. For the present the important thing for 
us to note is the achievement. 

The question may fairly be raised: What 
has the generation which has succeeded George 
Eliot's done to carry on the ideal? The an- 
swer is not easy. We stand in the middle of 
a confused tangle of contradictory develop- 
ments. Our cosmopolitan and international 
ideals have of late suffered a rude shock, which 
must inevitably change their course and modify 
their accents. Our social philosophy has also 
undergone change. A little of this is the nec- 
essary reaction which always follows the par- 
tial achievement of an aim, or the half-com- 
pletion of a definitely expressed purpose. Al- 
ways "a man's reach should exceed his grasp," 



18 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

and it is inevitable that ideals should expand 
with the increase in accomplishment, supersed- 
ing those which went before in some measure. 
We can point to some successes, and many fail- 
ures; to ideals which proved impossible of im- 
mediate fulfilment, and to visions which lacked 
the essentials for perpetuity. What we can 
say with definiteness is that, to the extent in 
which she expressed the idealism of her time, 
George Eliot did so in the direction which the 
subsequent generation has found most sound. 
The vision of a world set free can only be 
realized by the intelligent co-operation and 
mental rapprochement of thousands of individ- 
uals, each working in a limited area, and neces- 
sarily with limited opportunities. To help 
them understand the problems of their lives 
in their larger relations is more important than 
that they should have a clear knowledge of ab- 
normal psychology. The simple, straightfor- 
ward interpretation of their own lives holds far 
wider promise than the analysis of degeneracy 
and disease. Of the latter our law-courts and 
hospitals give an all too convincing picture. 



RATIONAL IDEALISM 19 

The generation which is ready to construct 
its coming life is not that to which George 
Eliot spoke. Instead, it is a generation which 
has included her in its list of discarded think- 
ers. Its mind is fed with violences, both of act- 
ual fact and of imaginative conception. The 
naturalists of the extreme Russian and French 
schools, to which Hardy's work has affiliations, 
could conceive no more overwhelming world- 
catastrophe than that which has made itself 
the commonplace of our times. The lawless- 
ness of the world of fact has out-run the law- 
lessness of the world of fiction. It is therefore 
small matter for wonder that such an orderly 
and essentially sane view of life as George 
Eliot's should have been superseded in popular 
favor. Not that it has been in any sense out- 
grown. Her appeal to tradition, her appreci- 
ation of the value of the conventional standards 
of marriage, let us say, is no less pertinent to- 
day than it was in 1870. In his book, Prob- 
lems of Conduct, Dr. Durant Drake cites 
Adam Bede as a book which every adoles- 
cent boy or girl should be required to read, for 



20 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

the soundness of its point of view. Twentieth 
century eugenic education can go no further 
than this. 

It may be that this newer generation is not 
so far removed from the old except in its 
phraseology. That undoubtedly has changed. 
To the old ideals we have given a wider sig- 
nificance, in some cases, and strange new 
names ; we have invented a disturbingly scien- 
tific terminology to replace the vaguer, simpler 
nomenclature of our forbears. Faith, Hope, 
and Love are still the cardinal virtues, but as 
frequently as not we disguise them under the 
pretentious titles of Economic Adjustment, 
Social Unrest, and Race Culture, or similar 
phrases. But in actual practice the problems 
are always the same — to walk uprightly and 
humbly, to love mercy and justice, are the un- 
changing ideals among men. 

" Ardent souls, ready to construct their com- 
ing lives, are apt to commit themselves to the 
fulfilment of their own visions." What George 
Eliot's own vision was her work has shown us. 
In nothing was it clearer or more close to ful- 



RATIONAL IDEALISM 21 

filment than where it touched upon the delicate 
adjustment of women to society. What the 
factors were which entered into the perception 
thus recorded, this is not the place to state. 
Undoubtedly, however, personal experience 
figured largely to produce an exceptional un- 
derstanding of the currents and cross currents 
which make for a sound social morality. Above 
all, her work is founded on a plain conscious- 
ness of the fundamental realities of society. 
There is nothing exotic or unnatural about her 
attitude. Realism is the basis of her artistic 
skill. In this realistic attitude is shown the lit- 
erary manifestation of the much-vaunted scien- 
tific spirit of the past century. Where both are 
rightly conceived neither science nor idealism 
need fear each other, for their end is the same. 
Whereas the scientist looks at the instrument 
by which the change is to be brought about, 
the idealist regards the personality which is to 
achieve it. The union of these two points of 
view produces great realistic art. 

How these two elements may be divorced, 
and what results therefrom forms a separate 



22 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

study. In Hardy there is an example of what 
passes as the scientific attitude, independent 
of moral or social restraints, operating in the 
field of literature. What can be achieved by 
this method, and what are its shortcomings, 
it is the purpose of subsequent discussion to 
show. By contrast with George Eliot, the 
differences between the new and the old hu- 
manitarianism become apparent, and the need 
for a rational idealism gains in emphasis. 



II 



HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC 
SPIRIT 

THE gulf between George Eliot and 
Thomas Hardy, though a short one in 
point of time, represents an immeasurable 
change in point of view. Those who admire 
Hardy are accustomed to credit him with al- 
most unbounded authority in the interpreta- 
tion of the life he pictures, with a profound 
knowledge of the subtleties of human charac- 
ter, and with a comprehensive philosophy to 
explain his observations. Granting these, it is 
not far to the conclusion that here is a great 
realist. As a matter of fact, the qualifications 
necessary in this connection are many and va- 
rious. Of realism, in the sense in which that 
term applies to George Eliot, there is but lit- 
tle. In her case there is a humanism which is 

23 



24 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

practically not far removed from the scientific 
spirit, characteristic both of her century and 
the present, which is utterly lacking in Hardy. 
Hardy is the romantic decadent, and this 
shows in his entire attitude toward life and lit- 
erature. 

The contrasts are interesting and suggestive. 
The essence of the scientific spirit is candid, 
impartial vision, which is incapable of ignoring 
data which may interfere with theory; it is a 
straightforward recognition of all known as- 
pects of a given problem, and an honest at- 
tempt to evolve from the inchoate body of in- 
formation a law or principle to consort with the 
whole. As in the natural sciences, so in litera- 
ture. The realist must proceed in the same 
spirit. And this is not of necessity inconsist- 
ent with strong moral or artistic purpose, 
though the desire to heighten an effect or 
strengthen a case by misrepresentation or even 
distortion of facts must be reckoned as one of 
the temptations of the undertaking. 

It is in this spirit that George Eliot writes. 
She makes no effort to narrow her field except 



HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 25 

as the outlook of her characters narrows it for 
her. On the other hand, she does not unduly 
widen it beyond their horizon. She does not 
confine herself to the limitations of a single 
rank or class, or to certain forms of experience 
within the group. All phases of life are por- 
trayed. Romola ministers to her blind father, 
catalogues his books, consults her guardian 
about trivial household affairs, and at the same 
time follows the combined guidance of her rea- 
son and her affection in the conduct of her life 
with Tito. It is always necessary for her to 
feed her poor and carry out her daily tasks, 
whatever her mental anguish. Thus the analy- 
sis of the underlying motives and passions 
gains force and intensity from its setting. 
Adam Bede carries his idealism into his work- 
shop as into his home: 

I can't abide to see men throw away their 
tools i' that way, the minute the clock strikes, 
as if they took no pleasure in their work, and 
was afraid of doing a stroke too much. . . . 
I hate to see a man's arms drop down as if he 
was shot, before the clock's fairly struck, just 



26 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

as if he'd never a bit o' pride and delight in 's 
work. The very grindstone 'ull go on turning 
a bit after you loose it. 

Such a man is never wholly detached in his 
personal griefs and misgivings from the daily 
tasks which make up the common round of life. 
He is never dissociated from his fellow mortals 
except in the skill of his apologist. The 
stream of life that carries him along is not un- 
usual in any respect. It is made up of hum- 
drum occurrences, lights and shadows, dark 
places and clear, all deftly manipulated to show 
without exaggeration what lies within. 

This is the scientific spirit in the inclusion of 
material. The next business is the classifica- 
tion, analysis, and assaying of the material 
which is thus comprehended. This is nothing 
less than the critical attitude, which tests all 
things impartially, approves whatsoever is 
lovely and of good report, while rejecting the 
unworthy portions of that which comes within 
its view. George Eliot is never afraid to face 
facts. The tragic end of all Lydgate's ambi- 
tions, the pitiful inadequacy of the opportunity 



HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 27 

vouchsafed to Dorothea Brooke, and the 
broken music of Romola's life, all receive due 
attention. There is never any lack of sym- 
pathy, or euphemism ; but the euphemism never 
conceals or befogs the issue. There is a tact 
in the handling of powerful themes and crude 
passions which softens their harshnesses with- 
out obscuring the issues involved. Calling a 
spade a spade, while traditionally excellent, is 
not always the most effective way of opposing 
an undesirable condition. One is reminded of 
Stevenson's delightful sentence: 



Thus, when a young lady has angelic fea- 
tures, eats nothing to speak of, plays all day 
on the piano, and sings ravishingly in church, 
it requires a rough infidelity, falsely called 
cynicism, to believe that she may be a little 
devil after all. Yet so it is ; she may be a tale- 
bearer, a liar, and a thief; she may have a 
taste for brandy and no heart. My compli- 
ments to George Eliot for her Rosamond 
Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has trans- 
muted to the ends of art by the companion fig- 
ure of Lydgate; and the satire was much 
wanted for the education of young men. 



28 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

The critical attitude is none the less power- 
ful for being accompanied by reticence and del- 
icacy of feeling. 

Finally, the purpose for which the investi- 
gation is undertaken differs in the humanistic 
realist from that which moves a naturalist like 
Hardy. George Eliot has a moral purpose, — 
sometimes, it must be confessed, too intrusive, 
— which spurs her to show the follies, the weak- 
nesses, and the sins of those whom she por- 
trays. These are always shown as excrescences 
which disfigure the constructive ideal which 
fills her mind. Even her notable failures must 
be reckoned as attempts to embody this ideal; 
but it is hardly to be wondered at that she 
should fail in the representation of human 
characters wholly without flaw or blemish. 
There is only one convincing record of such a 
personality in literature, and this is marred by 
the stigmata of Calvary. 

Of scientific spirit in this sense there is none 
in Hardy. He makes no attempt to reproduce 
the life of the Wessex towns in anything like 






HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 29 

its completeness and probable soundness. 
Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from 
the Madding Crowd are the only novels in 
which the sexual passion plays no more than a 
normal part in the development of character. 
In Jude the Obscure the author is frankly 
interested only in studying the effect upon a 
particular organism of the two sensual pas- 
sions, love and the thirst for strong drink. His 
studies are of degenerate or degenerating char- 
acter, or of character fluctuating under every 
breath of inclination or circumstance. Here 
are folk with neither morals nor ideals, who 
are utterly without principle upon which to 
base their action. Such a drifting character 
is Tess; Dr. Fitzpiers of The Woodlanders 
is another, as is Mrs. Charmond, the lady of his 
affections. Eustacia Vye and Wildeve are 
another pair who show the same qualities ; and 
because the descriptions of the latter are so 
characteristic both of Hardy's men in gen- 
eral, and of this peculiarity in his point of 
view, they should be quoted here : 



30 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

He was quite a young man, and of the two 
properties, form and motion, the latter first at- 
tracted the eye to him. The grace of his move- 
ment was singular; it was the pantomimic ex- 
pression of a lady-killing career. Next came 
into notice the more material qualities, among 
which was a profuse crop of hair impending 
over the top of his face, lending to his forehead 
the high-cornered outline of an early Gothic 
shield, and a neck which was smooth and round 
as a cylinder. The lower half of his figure 
was of a light build. Altogether he was one 
in whom no man would have seen anything to 
admire, and no woman would have seen any- 
thing to dislike. . . . 

To be yearning for the difficult, to be weary 
of the offered; to care for the remote, to dis- 
like the near; it was Wildeve's nature always. 
This is the true mark of the man of sentiment. 
Though Wildeve's fevered feeling had not been 
elaborated to real poetical compass, it was of 
the standard sort. He might have been called 
the Rousseau of Egdon. 

In none of these cases is the wrongdoing 
the result of positive wickedness. Fitzpiers 
is in nowise to blame for his sudden attach- 
ment to the mistress of Hintock Manor — he 
had never seen her until after his marriage to 



HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 31 

Grace Melbury. Tess was fated not to meet 
the perfect complement to her own nature un- 
til after the fatal connection with Alec D'Ur- 
berville, and deserved no blame for her weak- 
ness; and so with Eustacia's lover. There is 
neither constancy nor spiritual integrity 
among these folk, with but rare exceptions, 
and these are generally of slight interest for 
the author. 

Closely allied with his concern for special 
phases of experience only, comes the cognate 
attempt to reproduce the psychology of abnor- 
mal sex development. There is scarcely a 
novel or a tale which does not contain the fig- 
ure of an over-sexed man or woman, or of both, 
whose unconscious and unrestrained indulg- 
ences form the mainstay of the story, if they 
are not actually the whole material of the plot. 
This is true in The Return of the Native, in 
Jude the Obscure, and in A Pair of Blue 
Eyes, to mention cases almost at random. 
Characters who start with normal sympathies 
and aims, such as Thomasin Yeobright, are 
distorted by contact with these, and woven into 



32 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

a phantasmagoric vision of sin and corruption, 
hopeless of cure, and often unconsidered in its 
true figure of disease. Two characteristic de- 
scriptions of women will serve to bring home 
the peculiarities of the type, both for itself and 
in its relations to the men of Hardy's imagina- 
tion. The first, and simplest, illustration is 
taken from The Mayor of Casterbridge: 

Lucetta, as a young girl, would hardly have 
looked at a tradesman. But her bereavements 
and impoverishments, capped by her indiscre- 
tions in relation to Henchard, had made her 
uncritical as to station. In her poverty she had 
met with repulse from the society to which she 
belonged, and she had no zest for renewing her 
attempt upon it now. Her erratic heart longed 
for some ark into which it could fly and be 
at rest. Rough or smooth, she did not care, 
so long as it was warm. 

More subtle in its implications is the picture 
of Mrs. Charmond, as she appeared to Grace 
Melbury on the occasion of the girl's first visit 
to her : 

"Do," she said, leaning back in her chair and 
placing her hand above her forehead, while her 



HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 33 

almond eyes — those long eyes so common to 
early Italian art — became longer and her voice 
more languishing. She showed that oblique- 
mannered softness which is perhaps most fre- 
quent in women of darker complexion and 
more lymphatic temperament than Mrs. Char- 
mond was; who lingeringly smile their mean- 
ings to men rather than speak them, who in- 
veigle rather than prompt, and take advantage 
of currents rather than steer. 

There is everything in the customary life of 
the farms and hamlets to foster such excesses. 
Hardy is not content with placing abnormal 
people into normal circumstances of life, as 
nature generally is ; he must add to the squalor 
and sordidness conditions which shall emphati- 
cally preclude the possibility of escape from 
environment or heredity — on the whole, a quite 
unnecessary provision, since without this ad- 
ditional handicap the situation was sufficiently 
adverse. 

"Science is the systematic classification of 
experience," said George Henry Lewes. There 
is nothing in this view of human life to justify 
one in considering Hardy's point of view sci- 



34 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

entific. There remains the question of whether 
he is scientific in his handling of his theme. It 
is generally admitted that the scientific atti- 
tude is in the last degree impersonal, and in 
this faculty of impersonal representation 
Hardy perhaps exceeds George Eliot, for her 
sympathy with all her characters makes her 
attitude by no means that of the detached 
omniscience which is characteristic in the other 
case. The deficiency, if such it is, lies in a 
different direction. Science is always a matter 
of fixed proportion, fluctuating, it may be, but 
exact and measured in the flux. Incidents in 
Hardy have no proportion in this mathemati- 
cal sense. There is something roughly corre- 
sponding to the old theory of humors in his 
treatment of character, for his habit is to trace 
simply the effect of a single passion upon a 
person's life. Presumably there were many 
instances where the normal duties and con- 
cerns of Sue Bridehead's life overpowered her 
supersensitiveness in matters relating to the 
lusts of the flesh. But of these we have no 
trace. There is no evidence that there devel- 



HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 35 

oped in her any of the passion of maternity 
which may fairly be called one of the funda- 
mentals of womanhood, be it never so per- 
verted. The murder of her children affects 
her only in its bearing on her own tangled 
theory and practice of sex-relations. She is 
typical of many other such characters, male and 
female alike. 

Such lack of proportion is unjustifiable on 
artistic grounds. It dispels the illusion of real- 
ity either as to fact or sentiment, leaving in its 
place only the sense of pathological investiga- 
tion. This seems at first sight firm, if unsa- 
vory, scientific ground. So it would be, if it 
could be relied upon. But as a matter of fact, 
even this pillar of strength is withdrawn; for 
there is no psychological justification for much 
that forms the stuff of these studies. There 
are many errors in the psychology of "Tess," 
unrecognized for reasons which are presently 
to be noted. A reservation might be made 
along one line, however. In the portraiture 
of old men, in whom the passion of love has be- 
come transmuted into the sentiment of pater- 



86 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

nity, and of old women, Hardy reaches per- 
haps the truest analysis of character — less en- 
trancing, to be sure, than his pictures of youth- 
ful exuberance and vitality, but so much the 
more natural and intelligible. 

As to morality, he is indifferent. Right or 
wrong makes little difference in his presenta- 
tion ; his interest is solely in the picturesque as- 
pects of his material. Science, undoubtedly, 
knows no ethical values ; and it is an open ques- 
tion whether art should recognize any such dis- 
tinctions with greater propriety. Dr. John- 
son would answer unhesitatingly that it must, 
and would find ample room for censure in what 
would certainly impress him as positive immo- 
rality, or at best a perverse inversion of moral 
values. His view is, of course, that of an ex- 
tremist. But it is not necessary to go to the 
opposite pole as has been the custom in the re- 
action from the older formalism, and to exclude 
all ethical values from the province of art en- 
tirely. The only demand which we may rigidly 
enforce upon the artist is that of truth to fact 
and sentiment, so that we may be sure of an 



HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 37 

honest attempt to achieve the ideal formulated 
by Joubert, — "The ordinary true, or purely 
real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion 
on a ground of truth — that is the secret of the 
fine arts." 

The ideal of life which Hardy develops is 
one which allows only degeneration to the in- 
dividual. Even the forces which seem to lead 
to the highest and most hopeful development 
meet invariable checks and cross-currents 
which bring them to nothing. Hardy's char- 
acters never pass from a lower to a higher 
spirituality, as George Eliot's frequently do; 
they are bound on the wheel of life which in- 
exorably breaks them in its revolutions. Self- 
control is an impossibility, and indeed unneces- 
sary, for where fate is all-powerful, control 
or intemperance are alike unable to avert the 
catastrophe or determine happiness. Thus, 
there is nothing to be gained by striving, no 
value in effort, no hope of salvation either by 
faith or by works. This is contrary to the spirit 
of scientific research, which looks constantly 



38 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

forward in the hope of solving difficulties in the 
light of the knowledge already gained. 

Yet, in spite of these limitations, Hardy's 
power is undeniable, and it is of extreme inter- 
est to notice on what basis it rests. In part 
it is due to the use of legitimate artistic means, 
and so far as this is the case it is altogether 
praiseworthy. There is no question that he has 
the gift of lyric expression to a high degree. 
Such scenes as those of the courtship of Tess 
and Angel Clare in the dairy at Talbothays 
are full of passionate intensity and lyric en- 
thusiasm which lift them into the range of high 
literature. This is the effect of remarkable 
stylistic gifts, and the result of genuine artistic 
feeling. 

But after this legitimate power is exhausted, 
Hardy makes use of another which is more 
questionable. He does not hesitate to describe 
with lavish detail the circumstances which lead 
up to acts of violence or brutality. This is in 
the name of psychological analysis, perhaps. 
Very well. These crimes and misdeeds are 
almost invariably those resulting from some 



HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 39 

perversion of the sex-instinct, which, as a gen- 
eral rule, is consciously stimulated by one or 
another of the parties concerned. In this con- 
nection it is interesting to notice the recurrence 
of a special vocabulary to increase the sugges- 
tiveness at which he aims. The word "stultify" 
occurs with frequency. "Fervid" and "per- 
fervid" and similar words are of common oc- 
currence. So also the adjective used to de- 
scribe Tess' physical perfections in the follow- 
ing sentence: "This morning the eye returns in- 
voluntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, 
she being the most fleocuous and finely drawn 
figure of them all." By stylistic tricks like 
these, whether consciously or unconsciously, he 
predisposes to a somewhat unhealthy mental 
position. For aptly chosen words may have 
the same stimulating effect as music. There is 
no astringent principle in handling these 
themes, like that which in the older literature is 
supplied by the belief in conscience and the 
moral law, to counteract the freedom of man- 
ners and conduct which is practised. There is 
no power of free-will. 



40 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

Having thus established his atmosphere by 
the use of natural artistry and artificial sugges- 
tion, Hardy makes use of it to further develop 
an illegitimate end. Jude the Obscure is a 
revolt against the usual conditions of mar- 
riage. This is the most elaborate case, but it is 
by no means exceptional. The theme recurs 
with unfailing regularity. Revolt against the 
traditional standards of sexual morality is the 
basis of every novel in some fashion, and this 
leads insensibly to the development of cognate 
anarchies. The individualistic fallacy cries 
out from every page. 

The foregoing is a bald statement of the 
moral positions involved. No one will ques- 
tion the legitimacy of an artist's use of all his 
skill in developing his thesis; but it is a fair 
question whether he has a right to gain his ef- 
fects by pandering to the least worthy instincts 
and prejudices of his readers. Sometimes, of 
course, he may justify the means by the end to 
be attained. In the cases where there is a fully 
developed philosophy of life, the justification 
may fairly rest on this. We may then ask with 



HARDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 41 

propriety how this counteracts or confirms the 
recognizably illegitimate means by which it is 
expressed. 

Hardy's philosophy is, as might be inferred, 
one which glorifies the liberty of the individual 
in all matters of conduct and behavior. There 
never occurs to any of his folk the question of 
their relation to society at large or the possi- 
bility of duties toward any save their own in- 
dividualities. It becomes, therefore, a matter 
of pity rather than censure when, in following 
the dictates of individual conscience, one or 
another hapless wight incurs the traditional re- 
proach and contumely with which society, as at 
present constituted, visits offenders. The iron- 
ies which Hardy perceives in life are really 
nothing less than the discrepancies between ac- 
tion induced by the individual perception of 
moral relations and those traditionally ac- 
cepted by social usage. This individual liberty 
is particularly to be exercised in those personal 
relations between men and women which seem, 
on the surface, to be matters of individual con- 
cern only, but which are more and more being 



42 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

recognized as charged with a significance of 
which society at large must take cognizance. 

Of the right or wrong of such a philosophy 
this is not the place to speak. The outstanding 
fact is that here is a view of life antagonistic to 
any which has stood the test of successful prac- 
tice, enforced by a series of pictures which have 
no relation to actual conditions, and which 
serve only to emphasize the individual belief 
of their author. No remedy is possible, for no 
real condition has been shown. No social 
changes are possible, for no definitely recogniz- 
able evils have been exposed. Hardy's philoso- 
phy is formed to explain and justify circum- 
stances invented and elaborated in romantic 
indifference to the usual business of life. It is 
utterly foreign to the scientific ideals of the ma- 
jority of the generation which produced it. 

The scientific spirit is that in which George 
Eliot conducts her representation of provincial 
life. Not only does she seek fidelity to the 
facts of life, but also fidelity to humankind 
itself. This has been the path of sane realism. 
Hardy is but following the fashion, set by Con- 



HAUDY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 43 

tinental novelists, of searching for the heart of 
man at one of the extremes of development, 
and choosing for that purpose those who are of 
the lower ranks of spiritual creation. George 
Eliot shows the limitations imposed on her 
by the medium through which she works. In 
fiction, even of the realistic sort; we still insist 
upon a hero, a heroine, and a villain, after the 
old melodramatic style, but thinly disguised. 
For the villain, indeed, we have developed new 
attributes and powers. Society, alcoholism, 
heredity, are some of the newer names for an 
old acquaintance. In the novels of George El- 
iot there is rarely a hero, never a villain, and 
only occasionally a heroine. Certain characters 
there are whose fortunes are made pivotal, per- 
sons around whom the lives of a group center ; 
but no one of these is of greater intrinsic im- 
portance than another. In a measure this is 
traceable to the leisurely method of an older 
generation, which allowed space for detail such 
as a modern novelist, willing or not, must 
forego. But it is also the result of an impartial 



44 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

and open-minded attitude toward life which 
recognizes no limitations of interest. 

In this day of excessive enthusiasm for the 
uplift of women, the difference between the 
scientific attitude, which is essentially the criti- 
cal attitude, and the emotional one, may best 
be discerned and analyzed in relation to the 
woman question so-called. The problem of the 
normal woman as well as that of the abnor- 
mal woman may serve as a touchstone by 
which to test and determine values. It is only 
by some such study that we can understand the 
principles involved in such a radical difference 
of outlook as presented by George Eliot and 
Hardy, 



Ill 

WEAK SISTERS 

PERHAPS no point of contrast among 
many between Thomas Hardy and 
George Eliot is more striking than their treat- 
ment of womanhood. It is not merely the 
difference in perspective between a man's view 
and a woman's ; neither is it a question of sev- 
eral years' difference in point of time; it is 
a fundamental contrast in point of view, to 
explain which leads into a long study of con- 
ditions and conventions. To say that Hardy's 
attitude is French is simply to evade the is- 
sue. If that were the distinction, however, 
the question would still be legitimate : What is 
it that separates the French from other atti- 
tudes toward women? It is in reality a view 
of the relations between normal and abnormal 

women, often complicated to mean the relation- 

45 



46 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

ships between good and bad women, and opens 
in all its diversity the comparison between 
women whose lives are in accord with the con- 
ventional restrictions of society and those who, 
by their own or another's act, are placed out- 
side the pale of moral approbation. 

This distinction between the Latin and the 
Anglo-Saxon view of women is based on vary- 
ing conceptions of the relation of woman to 
society at large. If she be regarded wholly as 
a creature whose value lies solely in her sex, — 
as the emphasis is in Latin society, — it follows 
that in literature colored by such a view she 
will be treated as subject, chiefly, if not en- 
tirely, to those emotional states and crises which 
relate only to the development and necessities 
of sexual life. This is Hardy's attitude in 
the main. A characteristic sentence may be 
quoted in evidence thereof. It is part of the 
description of Tess as she appeared before the 
seduction by Alec D'Urberville: "Tess Dur- 
beyfleld at this time of her life was a mere 
vessel of emotion, untinctured by experience." 
Hardy's stories are of the mating, mismating, 



WEAK SISTERS 47 

and unmating of men and women, ignoring 
the existence of any other motives as determin- 
ing factors in human intercourse. Even in 
a book like Jude the Obscure, where in Sue 
Bridehead he tries to picture a woman rela- 
tively free from the dominion of sex, he sue- , 
ceeds only in creating an impression of sexual 
irresponsibility. The whole story of The Re- 
turn of the Native is the story of the malad- 
justment in these relations of an oversexed 
woman. 

On such a basis it is necessarily impossible 
to rear a structure of sound morality — or, in- 
deed, of morality in any sense; for morality 
rests fundamentally upon the power of the in- 
dividual to control his physical impulses. If 
to women are denied these essential means to 
grace, it leaves them, very properly, in some- 
what the relation to an androcentric world 
which Tennyson so bitterly decried: 

He will hold you, when his passion shall have 

spent its novel force, 
Something better than his dog, a little dearer 

than his horse. 



48 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

Such is essentially the Latin attitude toward 
womankind. 

At the other extreme is the conception which 
we take pride, somewhat unduly, in calling 
Anglo-Saxon. It is not always, perhaps, a 
genuine thing with us; but rather one which 
we hold up to the public gaze as an evidence 
of superiority, but to which our practice does 
not necessarily conform. It is an ideal of wo- 
manhood which allows participation of both 
sexes equally in the affairs of life, and grants 
to woman as to man the opportunity of shap- 
ing destinies and fortunes more far-reaching 
than her own. It is for this ideal that the so- 
called feminists of the present day are striving, 
often with blundering and through many mis- 
takes, but with the firm intention of emphasis- 
ing and establishing past question the woman's 
right to equal recognition and power with the 
man. The feminist attitude is concerned with 
the woman in industry, in public life, in ever 
increasing spheres of public usefulness and eco- 
nomic importance. 

The woman who is capable of this develop- 



WEAK SISTERS 49 

merit and of this consideration is not repre- 
sented in Hardy. Instead, it is her weaker sis- 
ter who holds the centre of interest — the 
woman who lives by reason of her sex, and for 
no other purpose. Such a woman, at her best, 
is capable of a high and sensitive emotional 
life, even, it may be, the refinement of grace 
and charm, but she holds no power over the 
minds of those around her. Sue Bridehead is 
perhaps the most elaborate study of this type 
which Hardy has made. From this point, 
through all the varying degrees of fineness, 
down to the utter vulgarity of Arabella Donn, 
he has traced the influence of such women. 
With all the changes of accent which are in- 
duced by differing situations he nevertheless 
preserves the same sentiment which makes the 
lure of such a portrait as this of Tess: 

She had stretched one arm so high above 
her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see 
its delicacy above the sunburn; her face was 
flushed with sleep and her eyelids hung heavy 
over their pupils. The brimfulness of her na- 
ture breathed from her. It was a moment when 



50 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any 
other time ; when the most spiritual beauty in- 
clines to the corporeal; and sex takes the out- 
side place in her presentation. 

At their lowest these women are the pitiable 
creatures of whom we think with sorrow not 
unmixed with horror. Of our attitude toward 
them, Hardy's is typical. The whole justifi- 
cation of Tess is contained in the sub-title: 
The Story of a Pure Woman. It is dis- 
tinctly significant that his attempt is this of 
rehabilitation, for the act of rehabilitation itself 
indicates a slackening of moral fibre, a relaxa- 
tion of the tension which is the mark of the 
times in which we live. Not that there can be 
too much of sympathetic pity for the misfor- 
tune and degradation involved in a social or- 
der which permits the development of such 
lives ; but even then there rises up for thought- 
ful consideration the necessity for some re- 
straint which shall effectively meet the evil and 
combat it. To Hardy, the story of Tess Dur- 
beyfield is that of a creature formed for love 
and the gratification of love, forced by an in- 



WEAK SISTERS 51 

evitable and inexorable chain of circumstance 
into actions which have for centuries borne the 
disapprobation of the world. We may regard 
the descriptions of her as characteristic of the 
author and of women in his thought : 

It was a thousand pities, indeed, it was im- 
possible for even an enemy to feel otherwise 
on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her 
flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, 
neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet; ra- 
ther all those shades together and a hundred 
others, which could be seen if one looked into 
their irises — shade behind shade — tint beyond 
tint — round depths that had no bottom ; an al- 
most typical woman, but for the slight incau- 
tiousness of character inherited from her race. 

She is the vehicle for all emotion, the iEolian 
harp on which every breath of fancy may make 
music: 

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space 
[listening to Angel Clare's music]. The ex- 
altation which she had described as being pro- 
ducible at will by gazing at a star came now 
without any determination of hers; she undu- 
lated upon the thin notes as upon billows, and 



52 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

their harmonies passed like breezes through her, 
bringing tears to her eyes. The floating pollen 
seemed to be his notes made visible, and the 
dampness of the garden, the weeping of the 
garden's sensibility. Though near nightfall, 
the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if 
they would not close for intentness, and the 
waves of color mixed with the waves of sound. 



Hardy's whole thesis is the essential blame- 
lessness of the woman under all the "bludgeon- 
ings of chance." If one attempts to oppose 
this with any doctrine of absolute right and 
wrong, one is hounded with the cry, as odious 
to our ears as to those that listened in "the 
spacious times of great Elizabeth" — of "Puri- 
tan," or is branded with the no less opprobrious 
mark of "Victorian." None the less, there re- 
mains the truth in the rigid attitude of older 
days, that sin is real and definite, and reaps a 
clear punishment. 

But Hardy recognizes no sin, therefore there 
can be neither condemnation nor retribution. 
There can only be the mantle of charity which 
recognizes an alien condition and seeks by its 



WEAK SISTERS 53 

own act to remove the barriers which separate 
the outcast from the ninety and nine who need 
no repentance. This is not the keynote struck 
by the "Let him who is without sin cast the first 
stone," be it observed ; it is rather the yielding 
to the inevitable which marks the fatalist. It 
is not necessary to carry the principle as far as 
in "Tess" to see the outcome. There are in- 
numerable passages in which Hardy puts in 
the mouths of different characters comments on 
the institution of marriage which plainly re- 
veal his tendency. A typical one is rather 
implied than expressed in this sentence from 
Jude the Obscure: "Wifedom has not yet 
annihilated and digested you in its vast maw as 
an atom which has no further individuality." 
Such things as this cannot be discounted as 
the imaginative rendering of the views of a lim- 
ited group; they come from many walks of 
life, and with such uniformity of emphasis that 
one cannot doubt that they reveal a definite 
mental outlook. The general tenor is that mar- 
riage is an institution whose sacredness and 
sacramental force are nullified by its legal 



54 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

status. The cynical comments of lago on 
good women are echoed in varying tones and 
accents, yet always with the same sardonic 
humor: 

She that was ever fair and never proud, 
Had tongue at will, and yet was never loud, 
Never lacked gold and yet went never gay, 
Fled from her wish, and yet said, "Now I may," 
She that, being angered, her revenge being 

nigh, 
Bade her wrong stay and her displeasure fly; 
She that in wisdom never was so frail 
To change the cod's head for the salmon's tail ; 
She that could think and ne'er disclose her 

mind, 
See suitors following, and ne'er look behind; 
She was a wight, if ever such wight were 

Des. To do what? 

Iago. To suckle fools and chronicle small beer. 

With such a debased view of the potentialities 
of marriage, it is little to be wondered at that 
the woman who dares to live outside its pre- 
cincts assumes a glamor and a halo to which 
nothing in her life or aims entitles her. It is 



WEAK SISTERS 55 

impossible to censure her if her sister within 
the pale is no better than she save in the single 
respect of conformity to law. 

From this sort of contemptuous regard it is 
pleasant to turn to such a point of view as 
that represented by George Eliot. There are 
few "weak sisters" in George Eliot's novels; 
Hetty Sorrel and Tessa are the two most not- 
able, with Maggie Tulliver as a possible addi- 
tion, — though this inclusion is somewhat doubt- 
ful, owing to the exceptional circumstances 
connected with the character. And in their 
weakness itself these are at the farthest remove 
from Tess and her kind. 

The distinctions are important. And the 
chief of them lies in the element of free-will. 
Hetty's downfall is compassed by weakness 
and the force of circumstances, it is true; but 
there is never an instant when she does not 
know that what she is tasting is forbidden fruit. 
She goes on from one step to another in the 
full knowledge that she is offending against 
the simple code in which she has been brought 
up. There is no case of unconscious wrong- 



56 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

doing, as we are taught to assume in Hardy. 
George Eliot recognizes the existence, in other 
words, of positive and undeniable sin. In the 
story of poor little Tessa, she gives us an- 
other phase of the same problem — the phase 
exemplified by the ignorant girl who has no 
knowledge to show her the* instability of her 
fool's paradise. Yet, even here, Tessa has mis- 
givings which, had they been coupled with 
greater intellectual keenness, would have 
shown her the wrong of which she was unwit- 
tingly guilty. Tessa is the dupe of a clever and 
unscrupulous man by reason of her ignorance 
of him and his connections ; but had she known 
the full truth, even her simplicity would not 
have prevented her from understanding the 
moral issues at stake. In other words, both 
Hetty and Tessa are creatures acting of their 
own volition and free choice. 

It follows naturally from this that marriage 
assumes a far different color from that with 
which Hardy invests it. 

She says at the conclusion of Middle- 
march: 



WEAK SISTERS 57 

Marriage, which has been the bourn of so 
many narratives, is still a great beginning as it 
was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey- 
moon in Eden, but had their first little one 
among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. 
It is still the beginning of the home epic — the 
gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that 
complete union which makes the advancing 
years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet 
memories in common. Some set out, like Cru- 
saders of old, with a glorious equipment of 
hope and enthusiasm, and get broken by the 
way, wanting patience with each other and the 
world. 

There is in her mind no possibility of extra- 
marital relations which can surpass the legiti- 
mate relation of husband and wife. Though 
this relation may not be achieved, yet she sees 
the substitutes for it in their true light — as the 
makeshifts which they are. Quaintnesses in 
marriage there may be; crotchets and whimsi- 
calities there often are ; but these are far from 
being the excrescences which Hardy shows. 
When she portrays uneasiness in the marital 
relation, it usually arises from the restlessness 
of one or both parties, who seek to weld to- 



58 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

gether incompatible elements. There is never 
the thought of escaping the bond, or of evad- 
ing its obligations, even though the result be 
spiritual death to one or both. 

It is notable that in this view of marriage 
there are not only none of the elements which 
make it degrading to the woman, but none 
which render it debasing to the man. The view 
which separates marriage from prostitution 
only by a legal ceremony, as does Hardy's, is, 
in the last analysis, no more creditable to the 
man than to the woman. Hardy's men are sen- 
sualists or emasculate; there is no middle 
ground. This is the defect of the so-called 
"French" attitude toward marriage. That 
sensuality can exist in marriage nowhere does 
George Eliot deny; but that it is the sole ex- 
cuse for it she does not admit. Her recogni- 
tion of the potentialities of even an unhappy 
marriage in the spiritual growth of man or 
woman is such as to render her attitude sane 
and wholesome even under the contemplation 
of domestic tragedy the most complete. In her 
attitude toward the "fallen" woman there is 



WEAK SISTERS 59 

none of the Pharisaism of mere convention, 
but none of the sentimentalism of the sensu- 
alist. 

For it is true that the charity toward the so- 
cial sins which Thomas Hardy inculcates is 
nothing else than the weak sentimentalism 
which overlies most self-indulgence. There 
is nothing fundamentally inspiring about the 
story of the plaything of human vices and pas- 
sions. And when that bauble is a woman's 
chastity, which through age-long experience 
we have learned to value at a high rate, it re- 
quires a great exercise of emotional irrational- 
ity to persuade us that the bitter experiments 
by which our knowledge has come are to be 
overruled. The social instinct which visits os- 
tracism and reprobation on these offenders is 
fundamentally a sound one. To oppose this 
Hardy has only one means at his command, 
the acceptance of which involves the renuncia- 
tion of all our hard-won belief in the dignity 
of the human will. If we are to say with him 
that here is no sin because no freedom, either 
to righteousness or to something else, the case. 



60 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HABDY 

rests complete. Under such a theory of human 
conduct it is impossible to make progress of 
any sort. 

The point may be raised with propriety: 
What of those women in Hardy's novels who 
do not incur or deserve condemnation for their 
excesses? This raises a curious answer. Such 
women are almost entirely shrews in the com- 
pletest sense of the term, — women who make 
their husbands' lives unhappy by reason of 
their overbearing behavior, women whose self- 
ishness makes any serious emotion impossible 
to them, and women whose lusts are concealed 
or obscured in wedlock — these are the only al- 
ternatives available. They are concrete exam- 
ples of what the Greek poet Simonides, in a 
bitter satire on women, described as the Fox- 
like group. I quote from Addison's rendering 
(Spectator, No. 209) : "A second sort of fe- 
male soul was formed out of the same materials 
that enter into the composition of a fox. Such 
an one is what we call a notable discerning 
woman, who has an insight into everything, 
whether it be good or bad. In this species of 



WEAK SISTERS 61 

females there are some virtuous and some vi- 
cious." Nearly all the women in A Group of 
Noble Dames will qualify under this descrip- 
tion, and a good many also in Life's Little 
Ironies and Wesseoc Tales. 

Such women justify the social reformer's 
tirade against "parasites." They are, in every 
sense of that term, creatures who prey upon 
the world in which they live. In Hardy they 
are specifically parasites in that they contribute 
nothing for their own maintenance, but drain 
the vitality of those about them. Stated in 
plain terms like these they sound most unat- 
tractive and unpromising literary material; 
but this is owing to the fact that we often fail 
to realize that parasitism is by no means in- 
compatible with the development of graces and 
beauties to a very considerable extent. In the 
physical world this is true ; and it is no less true 
in the moral world. Spiritual parasites are the 
harder to deal with from this fact. Rosamond 
Vincy is George Eliot's only example of the 
type — of whom she wrote: "She simply con- 
tinued to be mild in her temper, inflexible in 



62 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

her judgment, disposed to admonish her hus- 
band, and able to frustrate him by stratagem. 
As the years went on he opposed her less and 
less, whence Rosamond concluded that he had 
learned the value of her opinion." Hardy's 
women, virtuous in the cant acceptation of the 
term, are all of this kind. 

That there is an ideal higher than any of 
these George Eliot perceives; though she rec- 
ognizes also the impossibility of giving artistic 
expression to it. She it was who gave utter- 
ance to that commonplace of ordinary speech 
that "the happiest women, like peaceful na- 
tions, have no history," from her realization 
that ideal womanhood, and all womanhood as 
it approaches the ideal standard, must be meas- 
ured not for itself alone, but as it appears in the 
lives of those who develop from it. We may 
repeat Stevenson's phrase with the greater con- 
currence in such a view: "When the genera- 
tion is gone, when the play is over, when the 
thirty years' panorama has been withdrawn in 
tatters from the stage of the world, we may 
ask what has become of these great, weighty 



WEAK SISTERS 63 

and undying loves, and the sweethearts who 
despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity, 
and they can only show us a few songs in a 
bygone taste, a few actions worth remember- 
ing, and a few children who have retained some 
happy stamp from the disposition of their par- 
ents." Such are at once the best survivals and 
the most intangible. 

Whether or not it is possible to reconcile the 
French with the Anglo-Saxon ideal of woman 
and marriage, is a question to which no answer 
is easy. One may hazard the guess that in such 
matters the cases on both sides which most 
nearly approach the ideal are not far apart, 
though they may have started from the oppo- 
site extremes. It is not fair to brand with the 
name of a nation or a school such neuroticism 
as Hardy's, or to exalt a genius like George 
Eliot's as the representative of another type 
or phase. Truth lies in the middle as of old. 
Yet it is fair to insist that a society composed 
of weak sisters like those whom Hardy pic- 
tures is impossible and ephemeral. It has none 



64 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

of the elements which make for stability or 
permanence. 

The contrast becomes even more clear when 
we turn from the situation presented by the 
outcasts of the social order to the problems of 
the woman's development as it occurs under 
normal conditions, which George Eliot faces 
and analyzes. The comparison of these prob- 
lems, as they appeared a generation ago, with 
those which our contemporaries are trying to 
meet in feministic and other agitation, is illum- 
inating in the highest degree. Her solution is 
as noteworthy in its differences from the "ad- 
vanced" thought of the present day as in its 
correspondences. In many ways it is wiser and 
more helpful than our own, for it assumes as 
the fundamentals of a woman's heart and life 
the hopes and desires of which too frequently 
modern social movements, both of reform and 
of education, seek to divest her. 

It is only by such a study of the normal 
woman in her daily life that we can hope to 
understand the falsity of such an attitude as 
Hardy's to the outcast woman. Such under- 



WEAK SISTERS 65 

standing does not produce less of pity or of 
sympathy, but acknowledges the need of safe- 
guarding marriage from any sentimentalism 
which may stand in the way of preserving its 
integrity. Under any civilization there will al- 
ways be weak sisters ; but the tendency may be 
made such as to lessen the remission of the in- 
stinctive penalties and barriers with which 
women have sought from time immemorial to 
conserve and augment their power. Especially 
in a time like the present, when necessities of 
all sorts have been brought into line to change 
and subvert the traditional standards; when 
new ideals of personal liberty and individual 
self-realization have been developed to attack 
convention and custom; when economic pres- 
sure has been acknowledged a sovereign reason 
for the abandonment of the practices of estab- 
lished worth, — it must never be forgotten that 
weakness for a woman is a sin, and one whose 
gravity we are only beginning to estimate. 



IV 
"HER INFINITE VARIETY" 

Strength and honor are her clothing; and 
she shall rejoice in time to come. 

She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in 
her tongue is the law of kindness. 

[Proverbs.] 

PERHAPS no single passage in all lit- 
erature offers a better description of the 
influence and aims which until recently have 
been associated with good women than does 
that from which these sentences are quoted. 
It is only within late years that any funda- 
mental additions have been made to the list of 
virtues herein catalogued, and it is a question 
whether these are altogether improvements. 

To define or portray the aspirations and in- 
tentions of a good woman is not an easy task, 
and in the changing conceptions of the duties 
and privileges of normal women it is a rare dis- 

66 



"her infinite variety" 67 

tinction to stand in line with the soundest ten- 
dencies of the radicals and at the same time 
hold fast to that which has proved its value 
in the traditional view. George Eliot has 
achieved this, in the manner in which such an 
accomplishment most fittingly comes — without 
the parade of iconoclasm or the smug self-com- 
placency of reaction. It is in her analysis of 
home-loving women that she has most thor- 
oughly shown her right to be reckoned among 
the great interpreters of human nature. 

The outstanding characteristic of George 
Eliot's women is the sanity and poise with 
which they meet the various crises which con- 
front them. They are rarely hysterical, as are 
the creatures of Thomas Hardy's imagination, 
though at times they may display weakness or 
uncertainty. Even in a case like that of Gwen- 
dolen Grandcourt, where the futile groping 
after righteousness of an uninstructed woman 
forms the theme of one of the most pitiful and 
sordid stories in the whole series of novels, the 
elements of rational action are always present. 
As has been shown, there are no "weaker sis- 



68 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HAEDY 

i 

ters" in George Eliot's novels; there are no 
women whose lives are independent of individ- 
ual choice and freedom of will. This means 
that there are no ignorant women, in the full- 
est connotation of the term. 

For the inability to make a rational choice 
in the fundamental human relationships is the 
mark of genuine ignorance. All Thomas 
Hardy's women are therefore in the ignorant 
class. There are none such in the novels of 
George Eliot. Misguided or uninstructed 
these women often are, yet their instinct is to- 
ward the intelligent course. Significantly 
enough, this groping instinct leads them inevit- 
ably toward some form of higher education. 
There are, to be sure, plenty of men who can 
say, with Mr. Tulliver, "An over-'cute wom- 
an's no better nor a long-tailed sheep — she'll 
fetch none the better price for all that," — but 
the woman herself realizes that in education 
alone lies her great hope. And so she struggles 
toward it as best she may in the particular cir- 
cumstances of her own life. Dorothea Brooke, 
in her marriage to Mr. Casaubon, turned the 



"her infinite variety" 69 

whole force of her young idealism into the 
pathetic attempt to make herself a companion 
to the academic interests of her future hus- 
band. To this end she strove to master dead 
languages; to utilize every opportunity of her 
wedding journey to familiarize herself with 
the history and art which she supposed to form 
the background in his mind. The tragedy of 
her marriage lay in the fact that these could not 
penetrate the shell of pedantry and formal- 
ism which encompassed her husband. Gwen- 
dolen Grandcourt, knowing as she did the fal- 
sity of the motives which led to her marriage, 
and aware of the wrongdoing which had pre- 
ceded it, yet tried to give life to a dry branch 
by study and at least a rudimentary attempt 
at self-culture. With Esther Lyon, her love 
for Felix Holt began with a clash of wills over 
intellectual concerns. 

With one exception, the most interesting 
case of this striving after spiritual companion- 
ship is that of Maggie Tulliver. Her attempt 
from earliest childhood to enter into the various 
interests of her brother is the instinctive answer 



70 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

of the enlightened woman heart to the separa- 
tive education which tradition has given to 
men and women. Stevenson's comment : "The 
little rift between the sexes is immeasurably 
widened by simply teaching one set of catch- 
words to the girls and another to the boys," 
holds as true now as ever, in spite of the multi- 
ple endeavors of society to bring about the 
equality of the sexes. George Eliot under- 
stood intellectual companionship in fullest 
measure ; and that it could exist without sacri- 
fice of the "feminine" qualities she sought to 
prove, both in her novels and in her life itself. 
Her marriage to George Henry Lewes offers 
an illustration paralleled in literary history 
only by the other great idyll of the Brown- 
ings — both conspicuous justifications of the be- 
lief that the education of women should enrich 
rather than endanger the marriage relation, 
by making friendship possible within it. 

This is the modern attitude toward woman- 
hood and its potentialities, which has only of 
recent years approached fulfilment. The time 



"her infinite variety" 71 

is not so far distant when people could say, as 
did Montaigne in his Essay on Friendship : 

As concerning marriage, beside that it is a 
covenant, the entrance into which only is free, 
but the continuance in it forced and compul- 
sory, having another dependence than that of 
our own free-will, and a bargain commonly 
contracted to other ends, there almost always 
happens a thousand intricacies in it to unravel, 
enough to break the thread and to divert the 
current of a lively affection; whereas friend- 
ship has no manner of business or traffic with 
aught but itself. Moreover, to say truth, the 
ordinary talent of women is not such as is suffi- 
cient to maintain the conference and communi- 
cation required to the support of this constancy 
of mind to sustain the pinch of so hard and 
durable a knot. And doubtless, if without this 
there might be such a free and voluntary famil- 
iarity contracted where not only the souls 
might have this entire fruition, but the bodies 
also might share in the alliance, and a man be 
engaged throughout, the friendship would cer- 
tainly be more full and perfect ; but it is with- 
out example that this sex has ever yet arrived 
at such perfection ; and by the common consent 
of the ancient schools, it is wholly rejected 
from it. 



72 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

The contribution of the woman movement 
of the present to the social advances of the last 
half-century has been essentially this — of rec- 
ognizing in the intercourse between the sexes 
the possibility of relations heretofore supposed 
to exist within one sex alone. 

Underlying all George Eliot's portraits of 
women there is a conception of womanhood 
which she foreshadows most definitely in the 
prelude to Middlemarch. Perhaps it is an 
exaggeration of the facts to regard St. Ther- 
esa as the prototype of woman's life ; but never- 
theless, there is no little truth in the conception: 

Many Theresas have been born who found 
for themselves no epic life wherein there was 
a constant unfolding of far-resonant action, 
perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring 
of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with 
the measures of opportunity, perhaps a tragic 
failure which found no sacred poet and sank 
unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and 
tangled circumstance they tried to shape their 
thought and deed in noble agreement; but after 
all, to common eyes their struggles around 
were inconsistency and formlessness, for these 



"her infinite variety" 73 

later- born Theresas were helped by no coher- 
ent social faith and order which could perform 
the function of knowledge for the ardently 
willing soul. Their ardor alternated between 
a vague ideal and the common yearning of 
womanhood; so that the one was disapproved 
as extravagance, and the other condemned as a 
lapse. 

The medium through which this ideal of 
service is to be attained is always that of a 
worthy and beautiful love. "A supreme love," 
she says in Felix Holt, "a supreme love, a 
motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a wom- 
an's life, and exalts habit into partnership 
with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had 
where and how she wills; to know that high 
initiation she must tread where it is hard to 
tread, and feel the chill air and watch through 
darkness. It is not true that love makes all 
things easy; it makes us choose what is diffi- 
cult." In Romola there are sentences which 
show the other side of the shield: "There is 
no compensation for the woman who feels that 
the chief relation of her life has been no more 



74 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The 
deepest secret of human blessedness has half 
whispered itself to her, and then forever passed 
her by." 

The greatest example of fully rounded wom- 
anhood in all George Eliot's novels is this com- 
manding figure of Rornola, a woman who is the 
masterpiece of ancient saying. The fact that 
she is placed in an historical setting does not in 
the least detract from her importance as an 
idealized portrait. For the freedom offered 
by the humanism of the Renaissance, with its 
breadth of intellectual outlook, and limitless 
philosophical horizon, represents spiritual and 
mental possibilities which we have never sur- 
passed and but seldom reached in the centuries 
which have succeeded. Romola herself was the 
inheritor of all this wealth of learning and en- 
lightenment. She came to the problems of her 
marriage with a mind finely tempered by the 
discipline and understanding acquired by a 
long and toilsome self-cultivation. Her mind 
had been fully opened by contact with the 
greatest idealisms of centuries. It is little 



"her infinite variety" 75 

wonder that such a woman can fittingly stand 
as protagonist for her sex. 

And so she does. The ideal woman in 
George Eliot is of the Romola-type. This is 
the norm toward which all her women are turn- 
ing. Dinah Morris is of this sort, mutatis 
mutandis; Maggie Tulliver works toward it by 
painful endeavor; Dorothea Brooke, in the 
eagerness of her youth, seeks to achieve this 
ideal. Even such helpless and hopeless crea- 
tures as Gwendolen Grandcourt and Hetty 
Sorrel have their vision of an ideal existence 
less sordid and materialistic than that with 
which they are familiar. It is an ideal prefig- 
uring of a character of which it may be said, as 
she does, "It belongs to every large nature, 
when it is not under the immediate power of 
some strong, unquestioning emotion, to suspect 
itself, and doubt the truth of its own impres- 
sions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own 
horizon." But it is not content with this self- 
questioning; it takes refuge in action, in affec- 
tion, and in self-sacrifice. Its affections are 
of the sort epitomized in a sentence like this: 



76 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

"Love does not aim simply at the conscious 
good of the beloved object; it is not satisfied 
without perfect loyalty of heart ; it aims at its 
own completeness.' ' It feels that it is "good 
to be inspired by more than pity — by the be- 
lief in a heroism struggling for sublime ends, 
towards which the daily action of pity would 
only tend feebly as the dews that freshen the 
weedy ground to-day tend to prepare an un- 
seen harvest in the years to come." In the 
more purely intellectual field such a character 
holds its ideas in close relation to its feelings, 
but never lets the latter gain undue promi- 
nence. "As a strong body struggles against 
fumes with the more violence when they begin 
to be stifling, a strong soul struggles against 
phantasies with all the more alarmed energy 
when they threaten to govern in the place of 
thought." Yet in spite of all this, "After all 
has been said that can be said about the wi- 
dening influence of ideas, its remains true that 
they would hardly be such strong agents unless 
they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The 
great world-struggle of developing thought 



"her infinite variety" 77 

is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of 
the affections, seeking a justification for love 
and hope." 

This ideal is the ideal of all right-thinking 
women, even after a generation of unrest and 
social striving unparalleled in the history of 
woman's evolution. We have gone no further 
in the search for self-realization than George 
Eliot conceived and pictured in Romola. She 
has shown not only the resources created hy 
intellectual interests, but the power for social 
service and humanitarian endeavor generated 
by supreme ethical groping. The religious 
motive which underlies all our life is part of the 
twisted fabric which she develops. To such 
a nature sori-ow comes as part of the fulfilment 
of the law of being, not to be evaded or feared, 
but rather to be welcomed and understood. 
Faith comes to such, divested of its parasitic 
outgrowths, as the simple and sincere depend- 
ence of the soul in that which lies outside its 
ken — "the assurance of things hoped for, the 
evidence of things not seen." 

There are a number of intimate glimpses 



78 GEORGE EIJOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

which show the bent and direction of Romola's 
character. One such is Tito's comparison be- 
tween Tessa and Romola: 

He had felt an unconquerable shrinking 
from an immediate encounter with Romola. 
She, too, knew little of the actual world; she, 
too, trusted him; but he had an uneasy con- 
sciousness that behind her frank eyes there was 
a nature that would judge him, and that any 
ill-founded trust of hers sprang not from 
petty, brute-like incapacity, but from a noble- 
ness which might prove an alarming touch- 
stone. 

More direct are the passages in which Ro- 
mola's affection, and its disillusionment, are 
suggested and analyzed: 

At certain moments — and this was one of 
them — Romola was carried, by a sudden wave 
of memory, back again into the time of perfect 
trust, and felt again the presence of the hus- 
band whose love made the world as fresh and 
wonderful to her as to a little child that sits in 
stillness among the sunny flowers: heard the 
gentle tones and saw the soft eyes without any 
lie in them, and breathed again that large free- 



"her infinite variety" 79 

dom of the soul which comes from the faith that 
the being who is nearest to us is greater than 
ourselves. And in those brief moments the 
tears always rose: the woman's lovingness felt 
something akin to what the bereaved mother 
feels when the tiny fingers seem to lie warm on 
her bosom, and yet are marble to her touch as 
she bends over the silent bed. 

From the account of her interrupted flight 
from Florence comes an illuminating pas- 
sage: 

It brought a vague but arresting sense that 
she was somehow violently rending her life in 
two: a presentiment that the strong impulse 
which had seemed to exclude doubt and make 
her path clear might after all be blindness, and 
that there was something in human bonds 
which must prevent them from being broken 
with the breaking of illusions. That tender- 
ness and keen fellow-feeling for the near and 
the loved which are the main outgrowths of the 
affections, had made the religion of her life: 
they had made her patient in spite of natural 
impetuosity ; they would have sufficed to make 
her heroic. . . . She had endured and forborne 
because she loved; maxims which told her to 
feel less, and not to cling close lest the outward 



80 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

course of great nature should jar her, had been 
as powerless on her tenderness as they had been 
on her father's yearning for just fame. She 
had appropriated no theories; she had simply 
felt strong in the strength of affection, and life 
without that energy came to her as an entirely 
new problem. ... So far as she conceived her 
solitary, loveless life at all, she saw it animated 
by a proud, stoical heroism, and by an indis- 
tinct but strong purpose of labor, that she 
might be wise enough to write something which 
would rescue her father's name from oblivion. 
After all, she was only a young girl — this poor 
Romola, who had found herself at the end of 
her joys. 

There are some people who are afraid of 
such a type of womanhood as this foreshadows. 
They distrust it from one of two points of 
view, both expressions of extreme attitudes — 
that which regards it as "too radical," and 
that which declares it to be "too conservative." 
The reactionaries attack it because as it seems 
to them, it tends toward the unsexing of 
women. A woman whose brain is equal or su- 
perior to that of the men with whom she is 
brought into contact, is never a pleasant com- 



"her infinite variety" 81 

panion for them. Superiority which they are 
willing to acknowledge and take pride in, 
where its possessor is a man, seems to them pre- 
sumption and arrogance in a woman. Often, 
of course, they are absolutely right. The first 
effect of enlightenment, especially in its in- 
complete phases, is frequently an unpleasant 
one, but this is by no means a necessary con- 
comitant of the higher education. The tradi- 
tional conception of womanhood, by defining 
the sphere in which a woman's talents were to 
be exercised, left her no opportunity to com- 
pete with men — hence no opportunity to im- 
pose any check on them even in the matters 
which affected her own life. She was necessar- 
ily much more docile, easy to manage, and con- 
tented. The conservative sees all this vanish- 
ing and he fears its effect. He does not wish 
to see his own supremacy challenged in his 
household. What he does not realize is that 
the giving of wider opportunities to women is 
really nothing more than forcing wider oppor- 
tunities on men. The truly radical method of 
procedure is that which is actually in progress 



82 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

— the widening of the man's sphere to main- 
tain his superiority over the woman with her 
broadening horizon. 

From the radical point of view the difficulty 
with an ideal womanhood like George Eliot's 
is, though he would hardly enjoy the phrase, 
that it recognizes too fully the interdependence 
of the sexes. Even in her wildest moments, 
George Eliot does not conceive a world where 
men and women work out their destinies in a 
kind of persistent sex-antagonism. The his- 
tory of the one woman in whom she shows this 
revolt is typical and significant. The princess 
Halm-Eberstein, Daniel Deronda's mother, 
is a forerunner of the now famous type of 
Magda, the heroine of Sudermann's play. She 
is a woman whose revolt is only partial and in- 
complete — rendered so not by her lack of abil- 
ity, but by her own convictions, slow in ma- 
turing, but irresistible in their driving power. 
Her anxiety to secure for her son complete 
independence of his race and its traditions can- 
not prevent her passing on to him the inheri- 
tance of his grandfather's devotion. She her- 



"her infinite variety" 83 

self, though in her period of rebellion she was 
able to cut herself off from the knowledge of 
her child, was not able so to conquer the recur- 
rence of her normal wishes as to hold fast to 
her plan. Moreover, when she had to face the 
loss of her career as a singer, she could not 
face it alone, but sought her refuge in those 
things which are the common lot of all women. 
To the radical all this is incomprehensible. He 
cannot realize that equality of the sexes is quite 
possible without similarity of function. In- 
stead he demands for women, — for those who 
are unwilling as well as for those who are not, 
— "equal rights — give women the ballot; give 
them the right to make laws; give them equal 
recognition in industry." What he never adds 
as a corollary is the simplest step in the doc- 
trine of equality, — "Give them equal liabilities 
with men." The radical must learn that equal- 
ity is something more fundamental then simi- 
larity of function. 

An interesting and apposite discussion of the 
relation between the higher education as ap- 
plied to men and to women is to be found in 



84 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

Professor Hugo Miinsterberg's chapter on 
"Women" in the volume entitled American 
Traits. After an exposition of the deficien- 
cies of excessive feminization of education and 
culture, such as we see at the present time, he 
continues after this wise : 



"And this condition, in which the professional 
callings, the whole influence on the develop- 
ment of the younger generation, all art and 
science and morality and religion, come to be 
moulded and stamped by women, is precisely 
the one which some call equality of the sexes! 
The truth is evident here as everywhere, that 
equality cannot be brought about artificially. 
To force equality always' means merely shift- 
ing the inequality from one region to another; 
and if the primary inequality was the natural 
one, the artificial substitute must be danger- 
ous if it be more than a temporary condition. 
Nature cannot act otherwise, because nature 
cannot tolerate real equality. Equality means 
in the household of nature a wasted repetition 
of function; equality, therefore, represents 
everywhere the lower stage of the development, 
and has to go over into differentiation of func- 
tion. Nature cannot be dodged, and the 
growth of nations cannot escape natural laws. 



"her infinite variety" 85 

To say that man and woman must be equal de- 
mands a natural correction by bringing in the 
differentiation of function at some other point : 
you may decree equality to-day, but nature 
takes care that we shall have, in consequence, 
a new kind of inequality to-morrow." The con- 
clusion is characteristic: "Only one practical 
change must come in response to the urgent 
needs of our period: the American man must 
raise his level of general culture. In short, 
the woman's question is, in this country, as ul- 
timately perhaps everywhere, the man's ques- 
tion. Reform the man, and all difficulties dis- 
appear." 



Toward this fundamental relationship be- 
tween the sexes George Eliot's whole concep- 
tion of the woman question is directed. She 
realizes, more than do most of those who decry 
her attitude, the basic laws of development 
which govern women's lives. She knows that 
economic independence, political rights, and 
social liberties are only shibboleths to conceal 
the need for other and more long standing du- 
ties. With the problem of the surplus woman 
she does not deal; but in her consistent recog- 



86 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

nition of the relation of the woman to her 
home and her children she shows conclusively 
that that, in her mind, was the great field of 
advance. 

In view of this general alignment of woman- 
kind in its relations to society, one invariably 
reaches the question of what constitutes an 
ideal woman's life. This is, in effect, the ques- 
tion of what constitutes an ideal marriage. 
Necessarily, the answer varies with the needs 
of the individual. We say of marriage that it 
is a lottery, depending for its vitality upon 
personal qualities in the contracting parties. 
It was George Eliot who laid down the maxim 
that "Marriage must be a relation either of 
sympathy or conquest." How she regarded 
the opportunities for the development of sym- 
pathies we have seen in the case of Romola, 
considered as an ideal toward which our striv- 
ing tends. At the same time she had no il- 
lusions as to the nature of womankind. It 
was into the mouth of Mrs. Poyser, sensible, 
worthy woman, that she put that delightful ep- 
igram: "I'm not denyin' the women are fool- 



"her infinite variety" 87 

ish; God Almighty made 'em to match the 
men." Where inequality between the sexes 
occurs in her novels, it is due to lack of op- 
portunity for the woman, not to any other 
cause. 

One other determining factor George Eliot 
recognizes in studying women, of which some 
mention has already been made. She com- 
ments, with singular penetration and discern- 
ment, that "A woman's lot is made for her by 
the love she accepts." This fixes the respon- 
sibility for domestic situations equally on the 
shoulders of all who should bear it, for there 
is no woman so blind that she cannot discrimi- 
nate between higher and lower forms of love. 
The sentimental school-girl's idea of love may 
be no nearer the truth than that of the woman 
of pleasure; yet her sentiment may serve as a 
makeshift touchstone whereby to approach her 
most vital decisions. And even the rawest girl, 
contemplating the possibility of marriage, has 
some knowledge, often inaccurate and dis- 
torted, but yet in a measure reliable, of the 
duties and subjections which it imposes, suf- 



88 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

ficient to give her pause before she commits 
herself irrevocably. This is what makes such 
a situation as that of Sue Bridehead, with her 
continual plaint, "I had no idea that that was 
involved" such an impossible characterization. 
Virginity of spirit there is, and it is a very 
beautiful thing; but its manifestations are not 
those of an unreal ignorance or unreflecting ca- 
price. 

If the newer opportunities for women have 
done anything, it has been this — to make possi- 
ble the acceptance only of such love as the in- 
dividual woman feels to be her greatest need. 
It is here more than anywhere else that the re- 
laxing of conditions has been most helpful, 
making it possible for the woman to go forth 
and conquer destiny, demanding of it the kind 
of marriage most worthy of her, or, if need be, 
to refuse to accept the ignoble alternative. By 
so doing she has been able to maintain the value 
she chose to put upon herself. 

There is one other word which should be 
added to this — a man's reflection upon the 
place of a woman in his or any other's life. "I 



"her infinite variety" 89 

wonder," says Felix Holt, "whether the sub- 
tle measuring of forces will ever come to meas- 
uring the force there would be in one beautiful 
woman whose mind was as noble as her face 
was beautiful — who made a man's passion for 
her rush in one current with all the great aims 
of his life." Such womanhood it is the hope 
of our day to develop, by education, by liberty, 
by responsibility ; and our aims will be fulfilled 
by some such blending and incorporation of old 
ideals with new as George Eliot foresaw. 

Movements develop and pass; and yet, on 
the whole, things are not greatly changed. 
The broad outlines remain the same. There 
is not, in any proper sense, a "woman prob- 
lem" ; but there are the problems of multitudes 
of individual women. It is impossible to legis- 
late for all of them, for it is still true of woman 
that 

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale 
Her infinite variety. 

The only way in which any comprehension of 
the practical solution of the questions raised 



90 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

by the million and more cases which come be- 
fore the investigator can be attained is by fol- 
lowing somewhat the plan outlined, of unre- 
stricted education, coupled with the normal 
human and womanly responsibilities. It is no 
question of sex warfare or of unsexing; it is 
merely a recognition of the principle, voiced 
by many others as well as by George Eliot : 

A woman's rank 

Lies in the fulness of her womanhood — 

Therein alone she is royal. 

This royalty of spirit can only come through 
the recognition of her woman's difference, her 
woman's need, and her woman's duty. 






MEN OF STRAW 

THERE is nothing rarer in literary history 
than for a man to portray characters of 
both sexes with equal success. In the drama 
it is easier than in other literary forms ; but this 
is perhaps because the drama, per se, is only a 
quasi-literary genre, depending for its success 
on the wholly incalculable element of the ac- 
tor's personality, which may supplement the 
author's invention and conceal his ineptitudes 
to unlimited extent. The great novelists 
have been far from successful in this respect. 
Richardson, with a singularly feminine percep- 
tion, is able to trace the emotions and perplexi- 
ties in the soul of Clarissa Harlowe; but he 
cannot make of Lovelace a villain of flesh and 
blood, any more than Shakespeare could cre- 
ate such a being as we might ever fear to meet 

91 



92 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

in Iago, or Goethe such an one in Mephis- 
topheles. Fielding draws no women in whose 
verisimilitude we can believe, with the possible, 
and even then only occasional, exceptions in the 
daughters of delight who stray into his pages. 
The mutual antipathy between the two is only 
another instance of the same thing in a highly 
specialized form. Dickens shows the same in- 
ability to present female character in its com- 
pleteness; and Thackeray, for all his excep- 
tional achievement in Becky Sharp, must bear 
the same criticism. 

In view of all this, it is small wonder that 
neither George Eliot nor Thomas Hardy 
should succeed especially notably in the repre- 
sentation of both men and women. Of her 
ambitious studies of men, as distinguished from 
her vignettes, George Eliot has only three of 
unquestioned success — Adam Bede, Silas Mar- 
ner, and Tito Melema. Hardy has scarcely 
more. The rough, self -tormenting Mayor of 
Casterbridge, Henchard, is one of these ; Dig- 
gory Venn the reddleman is another. These 
are the most conspicuous examples, standing 



MEN OF STRAW 93 

almost alone, for reasons which will presently 
appear. What is significant is the manner of 
Hardy's failure to depict upright, straight liv- 
ing men. It is lacking in exactly the same de- 
gree that George Eliot is lacking, and for al- 
most the same reasons. 

If one may lay down a maxim in such a case, 
ignoring that other venerable fallacy — 

Woman's at best a contradiction still, 

it may be said that women are not able to rep- 
resent the healthy animal vitality, which in its 
lowest forms becomes brutality, through an 
artistic medium. This is due to the same men- 
tal qualities which credit them with the pre- 
ponderance of wit over humor. It follows, 
therefore, that characters in which they seek 
to represent the degenerative forces, let us say, 
must be of the subtler types. This explains 
the extraordinary insight which could produce 
Tito Melema. Such a character as Tom Jones 
could never come from a woman's brain. There 
is nothing in her understanding to correspond 
with it. When these subtler forms of degener- 



94 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

ating or disintegrating character are brought 
into the realm of the physical passions, they 
become studies of decadence. This is what 
Hardy does. Where George Eliot traces the 
influence of mental traits on actual conduct, 
Hardy indicates the effect of physical traits on 
behavior; and these studies form the basis of 
masculine character in their respective novels. 
The danger is that which actually results in 
several of George Eliot's novels — the substitu- 
tion of a man of straw for a flesh-and-blood 
mortal. That this should be the case with her 
is not so surprising as that it should be true also 
of Hardy. Yet examination proves the truth 
of the contention. 

One of the most conspicuous failures is 
George Eliot's figure of Daniel Deronda, a 
creature "without form and void," to whom 
Stevenson could refer in this delightful fash- 
ion : "Accepted lovers treat women to Grandi- 
sonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity. 
I am not quite certain that women do not like 
this kind of thing; but really, after having be- 
mused myself over 'Daniel Deronda/ I have 



MEN OF STRAW 95 

given up trying to understand what they like." 
This is an attempt to reproduce, through the 
medium of literature, a man whose sympathies 
are sufficiently alert, whose sensitiveness is suf- 
ficiently great, and whose intelligence is suf- 
ficiently keen to lift him above his fellows by 
force of character and talents. 

George Eliot's description of her hero il- 
lustrates both her ideal and her shortcomings: 
"His face had that disturbing kind of form 
and expression which threatens to affect opin- 
ion — as if one's standard were somehow wrong. 
His voice, heard now for the first time, was to 
Grandcourt's toneless drawl, which had been 
in her ears every day, as the deep notes of a vio- 
loncello to the broken discourse of poultry and 
other lazy gentry in the afternoon sunshine. 
Grandcourt, she inwardly conjectured, was 
perhaps right in saying that Deronda thought 
too much of himself: — a favorite way of ex- 
plaining a superiority that humiliates." That 
this is the consistent and permanent impres- 
sion, a later quotation will show. It is taken 
from the period of Gwendolen's confession to 



96 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

Deronda of her hatred for her husband, and 
her wish to encompass his death. "De voted as 
these words were, they widened his spiritual 
distance from her, and she felt it more difficult 
to speak: she had a vague need of getting 
nearer to that compassion which seemed to be 
regarding her from a halo of superiority, and 
the need turned into an impulse to humble her- 
self more." Such a character, endowed with 
the attributes of humanity as well as with the 
ideal virtues, we are familiar with in Henry 
Esmond, but nowhere else among the great 
novels is it to be found. Though a woman 
could conceive such a character, as undoubt- 
edly George Eliot did, she could not repro- 
duce it. 

Hardy comes to grief over the same rock, 
though he chooses a slightly different angle of 
approach. There are few studies of men in 
his work which are free from that hall-mark of 
decadence, sexual perversion. Of these, one 
which purports to be the portrait of a pure 
man, Giles Winterborne, in The Woodland- 
erSj is singularly lacking in reality or mascu- 



MEN OF STRAW 97 

Unity. What should be strength and self-con- 
trol becomes pusillanimous acquiescence in the 
situation as he finds it, to the detriment of the 
artistic likeness. What should be the proud 
sense of physical integrity in Angel Clare and 
Henry Knight becomes unenlightened, for- 
malists insistence on a nebulous kind of un- 
sophistication, quite unlike what either of them 
would hold needful for himself. Not only are 
the doctrines which they hold and practise in- 
consistent, but the characters from which these 
theories develop are self-contradictory. 

The strange, conglomerate image called 
Jude Fawley is another case in point. It 
shows, more definitely than either of the others, 
the fallacy of Hardy's method of approach. 
In Jude, he has tried to show the influence 
of sex upon a man's development. Jude has 
three vices, if they may be so grouped — wine, 
women, and Christminster. Physically he is at 
the mercy of the first; physically and spiritu- 
ally at the mercy of the second ; and spiritually 
at the mercy of the third. In a sense, indeed, 
the influence of Christminster upon Jude is a 



98 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

physical one — much like the "waving censers 
and the anthems loud" of Tennyson's concep- 
tion. It is impossible to construct a character 
of depth and verisimilitude upon this basis. 
The wholesome, open-air characteristics which 
exist everywhere in some measure, are utterly 
absent. Even Jude's physical intemperance is 
an ansemic thing, not to be compared to the 
frankly sensual excesses of Tom Jones or Rod- 
erick Random. There is cure for such incon- 
tinence as theirs ; the decadence of Jude is past 
remedy. 

In fairness it must be admitted that where 
Hardy undertakes to show the effects of what 
Stevenson calls the "midsummer passion" of 
love, to picture the lyric affection between a 
man and a maid, he succeeds with remarkable 
power, such as George Eliot nowhere shows. 
It is not an easy matter to understand the in- 
tense emotion which is not far from adolescent 
throes; and Hardy is singularly skilful in do- 
ing so. An example in point is taken from 
Tess: 






MEN OF STRAW 99 

Every see-saw of her breath, every wave of 
her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was 
a voice that joined with nature in revolt 
against her scrupulousness. Reckless, inconsid- 
erate acceptance of him, to close with him at 
the altar, revealing nothing and chancing dis- 
covery at that first act in her drama ; to snatch 
ripe pleasure before the iron teeth of pain 
could have time to shut upon her; that was 
what love counselled; and in almost a terror 
of ecstasy Tess confusedly divined that, despite 
her many months of lonely self-chastisement, 
wrestlings, communings, schemes to lead a fu- 
ture of austere isolation, love's counsel would 
prevail. 

But it should never be forgotten that young 
love is not by any means the only love, and that 
perpetual adolescence is a pathological con- 
dition. There is nothing in George Eliot to 
correspond with this lyricism of Hardy. Even 
in the idyllic portions of Adam Bede and 
The Mill on the Floss she fails to reach the 
same height of intensity and passion; but it is 
more than compensated for by the clearness 
and steadiness of her more limited vision. 

In the representation of such types as those 



100 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

attempted in Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt, 
George Eliot's blunders are perhaps the inevi- 
table ones. In Deronda she conceives, to quote 
Stevenson once more, "a man who delights 
women by his feminine perceptions," overlook- 
ing completely the other side of the balance, 
that he "will often scatter his admirers by a 
chance explosion of the under side of man." 
There is no evidence that Deronda ever be- 
haved with less than Chesterfieldian propriety. 
Antipathies he has none, even to such an ob- 
vious reprobate as Mirah's father, and in that 
instance the forbearance of a young man for 
the parent of his beloved does not fully account 
for his extraordinary patience. An episode, 
which, of course, had no place in the novel, re- 
cording the developments on some trying oc- 
casion after the marriage of Deronda, when 
the elder Cohen undertook to re-establish him- 
self in his daughter's household, would doubt- 
less, if faithfully transcribed, shed a very fa- 
vorable light upon the nature of the master of 
the family. But nothing of the sort appears. 
In the same way Felix Holt is unconvincing. 



MEN OF STRAW 101 

His original objection to Esther Lyon seems 
to lie in the more or less commonplace facts of 
her wearing silk stockings and reading Byron ; 
and his attraction for her rests largely on the 
scolding to which he treats her and his William 
Morris style of clothing and manners. There 
is no power of character shown to account for 
developments. Indeed, this is one of the epi- 
sodes which a man of Hardy's genius would 
have carried by its sheer lyrical intensity. The 
ratiocinative and intellectual elements would 
be left out, probably to advantage, if there 
were not substituted erotic distortions in their 
place. Whether Felix Holt would become a 
more virile character is another question; he 
would certainly be a more convincing lover. 
A word should be said about Adam Bede, 
who is a notable exception to the general weak- 
ness of the men whom George Eliot offers as 
typical of the average, normal man. In writ- 
ing of him her work was sufficiently that of 
portraiture to free her from the difficulties in- 
cident to independent creation. In following 
the development of a special character, her nat- 



102 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

ural defects are concealed or remedied. This 
same fact accounts for the extraordinary suc- 
cess of her vignettes, pen-portraits of unusual 
power, of which more in their place. 

George Eliot's studies of men may be classi- 
fied roughly into three general groups. In the 
first group fall such highly specialized figures 
as those we have been discussing — studies of 
excellent intention and indifferent execution, 
like those of Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda, and 
Philip .Wakem; portraits or realistic studies, 
usually of exceptional brilliance, such as Adam 
Bede, Silas Marner, and Amos Barton; and 
finally a group which includes such varying 
figures as Lydgate, Tito Melema, Tom Tulli- 
ver, Will Ladislaw and Grandcourt. Outside 
of these are her vignettes of peasants and of 
country gentry, which form a separate and dis- 
tinct category. In examining these groups it 
is a curious fact that the most artistically satis- 
fying are those of the two latter classes, espe- 
cially the last. It is almost as if her sympathies 
weakened her insight regarding those whose 
idealism she was most anxious to uphold. In 



MEN OF STRAW 103 

the analysis of characters for whom she has 
little or no affection, such as Matthew Jermyn, 
the corrupt steward of Felloe Holt, her per- 
ceptions are never at fault. In showing the 
mental and moral degradation of Tito Melema, 
she makes no blunder, from the first thought- 
less moment of reticence to the last penetrat- 
ing comment of Romola's : 

There was a man to whom I was very near, 
so that I could see a great deal of his life, who 
made almost every one fond of him, for he was 
young, and clever, and beautiful, and his man- 
ners to all were gentle and kind. I believe, 
when I first knew him, he never thought of 
anything cruel or base. But because he tried 
to slip away from everything that was un- 
pleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as 
his own safety, he came at last to commit some 
of the basest deeds, such as make men infa- 
mous. He denied his father, and left him to 
misery; he betrayed every trust that was re- 
posed in him, that he might keep himself safe 
and get rich and prosperous. Yet calamity 
overtook him. 

With the representation of Lydgate she 
shows herself equally discerning. Her deli- 



104 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

cacy of touch in portraying the fine and evan- 
escent idealisms of his early professional ca- 
reer, the clear vision which shows - the desperate 
misfortune of an ill-placed affection, and the 
slow moral disintegration resulting from an 
unworthy marriage, both combine to make a 
picture possessing the pitifulness which comes 
only from sympathy unbiased by lack of 
knowledge. To a less complete degree this is 
true of Will Ladislaw. Grandcourt and Tom 
Tulliver are less sympathetic studies ; one feels 
in them the same broad charity to excuse and 
forgive. It is in the portraits drawn from life 
that her most unforced artistry is seen. Obser- 
vation replaces theoretic judgment, and pro- 
duces a sureness of touch not to be attained by 
other means. 

Such a classification assumes significance if 
it leads, as in this case, to the discovery that 
among George Eliot's men there is no one to 
be reckoned in the same relation to other men 
that Romola bears to others among the women. 
As in Deronda, where we should have a human 
figure of heroic aspirations, of masculine pro- 



MEN OF STRAW 105 

portions, and of mortal tenderness, we are 
shown a man of straw, labelled as in the old 
morality plays, with the names of the several 
virtues he is designed to exhibit. 

Fortunately, these do not exhibit the whole 
range of George Eliot's observations of men. 
Among those sketches which I have called vi- 
gnettes there are many which show especial 
charm and merit. Usually these are figures 
taken from the humbler walks of life, though 
this is not always true. Sir Christopher Chev- 
erel, Philip Debarry, and Rufus Lyon are 
among these. Philip Debarry especially is a 
character of unusual charm. There is only one 
instance in which he appears, but we become 
firm friends at the end of it. I know of few 
more appealing sketches than this, in which the 
young patrician, wishing to express his grati- 
tude to the Dissenting clergyman, Rufus 
Lyon, for the return of valuable papers, allows 
himself to be held to his word in an embar- 
rassing juncture rather than be untrue to the 
promptings of his own fastidious sense of 



106 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

honor. A single passage visualizes both the 
actors in this bit of comedy: 

But when he rose the next morning, his 
mind, once more eagerly active, was arrested 
by Philip Debarry's letter, which still lay open 
on his desk, and was arrested by precisely that 
portion which had been unheeded the day be- 
fore. — "I shall consider myself doubly fortu- 
nate if at any time you can point out to me 
some method by which I may procure you as 
lively a satisfaction as I am now feeling, in that 
full and speedy relief from anxiety which I 
owe to your considerate conduct." 

To understand how these words would carry 
the suggestion they actually had for the minis- 
ter in a crisis of peculiar personal anxiety and 
struggle, we must bear in mind that for many 
years he had walked through life with the sense 
of having for a space been unfaithful to what 
he esteemed the highest trust ever committed 
to man — the ministerial vocation. In a mind 
of any nobleness, a lapse into transgression 
against an object still regarded as supreme, is- 
sues in a new and purer devotedness, chastised 
by humility and watched over by a passionate 
regret. So it was with the ardent spirit which 
animated the little body of Ruf us Lyon. Once 
in his life he had been blinded, deafened, hur- 



MEN OF STRAW 107 

ried along by rebellious impulse; he had gone 
astray after his own desires, and had let the 
fire die out on the altar; and as the true peni- 
tent, hating his self -besotted error, asks from 
all coming life duty instead of joy, and service 
instead of ease, so Rufus was perpetually on 
the watch lest he should ever again postpone to 
some private affection a great public oppor- 
tunity which to him was equivalent to a com- 
mand. 

And so the little clergyman begged Debarry 
to arrange for him a debate between Dissent 
and Establishment, and the patrician kept to 
the letter of his promise ! We know little else 
than this of him; but it is enough to make of 
him a permanent friend. 

So it is with Sir Christopher Cheverel, with 
his passion for architecture, his favorite airs, 
and his "black-eyed monkey"; with Sir Hugo 
Mallinger, and his generous care for the child 
of a woman he had loved ; and with many oth- 
ers beside. Among humbler folk there are al- 
most too numerous instances for mention. The 
whole company of worthies at the "Rainbow 
Inn" ; the gay Florentine patrons of Nello the 



108 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

barber, himself one of the most delightful of 
them all ; the mad painter Piero di Cosimo, the 
pedlar Bratti Ferravecchi and the rest, and the 
sinister shadow of Baldassarre — all these are 
folk whom we meet in daily life, and are to be 
held fortunate if we esteem at their true worth. 
It is perhaps most fully in these vignettes 
that we get the fruition of George Eliot's ob- 
servation of men. They present, in artistic 
form, the commentary of one who sees much 
at a glance and expresses what she sees in 
shrewd, clear, and often epigrammatic sen- 
tences. The condensation in these sketches is 
tremendous and their vigor unexampled. 
Hardy has the same faculty. He rarely makes 
a mistake in the psychology and delineation of 
these minor characters. The waits in The 
Return of the Native, the farmers and shep- 
herds in Far from the Madding Crowd and 
Under the Greenwood Tree — simple tran- 
scripts of everyday experience, are among 
the most delightful portions of his work. In 
so far as they deal with men, they may also be 
called the only uniformly successful studies, 

• 



MEN OF STRAW 109 

Contrast, for instance, the virile, if angular 
development of Henchard, in The Mayor of 
Casterbridge, with any of the subtler charac- 
ters; or compare the cleanly-drawn figure of 
Farmer Crick at Talbothays Dairy with any 
of the less masculine heroes. Farmer Melbury, 
of The Woodlanders, in his passionate anx- 
iety to serve his daughter's best interests, is a 
man of vitality far outweighing that of Angel 
Clare or Clym Yeobright and their like. 

The psychology of a minor character offers 
an interesting field for speculation. There 
are characters of secondary rank by reason of 
accidental position — people of whom one feels 
that they have a history of their own, available 
whenever occasion serves for its production, 
though not necessarily pertinent to the narra- 
tive of the moment. Such folk may well 
achieve greatness, though they be not born to 
it. Sometimes characters are minor through 
their own constitution — weak creatures they 
are whose individualities cannot overpower 
their circumstances, or "waylay Destiny, and 
bid him stand and deliver." And still a third 



110 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

group is of those whose greatness is, as it were, 
thrust upon them — men whose external his- 
tory gives them a prominence to which nothing 
in their lives or characters entitles them. Of 
this class are many of the principals whom we 
have been discussing. Half -successes and pos- 
itive failures like these are the truest index to 
an author's mental attitude. To have indicated 
truly the outlines of many personalities widely 
divergent is of more worth than to have failed 
in the drawing of one or two ambitious at- 
tempts. Differing as they do from one another 
in so many matters both of structure and de- 
tail, it is interesting to find, both in Thomas 
Hardy and George Eliot, the curious similar- 
ity, that their minor characters are men, their 
principals, men of straw! 



VI 

"THE SILVER ITERANCE" 

Say thou dost love me, love me, love me — toll 
The silver iterance — only minding, Dear, 
To love me also in silence with thy soul. 

— E. B. Browning. 

IT is the business of an artist to give per- 
manent form and record to those emotions 
and aspirations which lie too deep for ordinary 
speech in the lives of men. Such fundamental 
yearnings cannot, and should not, be lightly 
laid bare; but it is fitting that those who can 
widely perceive and generously interpret 
should preserve these flowers of the spirit. 
The Sonnets from the Portuguese give last- 
ing expression to such an experience; and 
Spenser's immortal Epithalamion — the 

Song made in lieu of many ornaments, 
With which my love should duly have been 
dect, 

ill 



112 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

Which, setting off through hasty accidents 

Ye would not stay your due time to expect, 

But promist both to recompense ; 

Be unto her a goodly ornament, 

And for short time an endless moniment, 

is a permanent tribute to the spiritual forces in 
life. Montaigne's Essay on Friendship com- 
memorates an ideally perfect friendship, and 
the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella owe their 
force and intensity to the literal obedience to 
the command 

Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart 
and write. 

To this record of passionate love, "wherein 
both souls and bodies might have entire frui- 
tion," George Eliot gives no contribution. 
Love of many kinds there is in plenty, but so 
strong is her sense of the tragic absence of per- 
fect affection, ideally given and received, that 
she does not venture to set down the story of 
those exceptional cases of the love that many 
waters cannot part. The one great love with 
which she deals is the story of a misplaced af- 
fection. On the other hand, she does not pre- 



"the silver iterance" 113 

sent the stories of sordid, brutal passions, such 
as men like Hardy use for the framework of 
their novels. None of her instances of illicit 
love are of this kind. The sin of Arthur Don- 
nithorne with Hetty is the sin of undisciplined, 
ignorant youth; such, in all probability, was 
the wrongdoing between Mrs. Transome and 
Matthew Jermyn; while of the liaison be- 
tween Grandcourt and Mrs. Glasher we know 
too little to judge. It is significant of George 
Eliot's tendency that though the supreme af- 
fection of a man for a woman is never directly 
pictured, there are many folk who give the 
best of themselves in their faulty and imper- 
fect loves. This is true of Tito Melema. His 
love for Romola, cramped and stunted though 
it was by his weakness, was yet the highest ex- 
pression of which he was capable. He is only 
the most striking example out of many similar 
ones. 

On the other side of the shield the portrai- 
ture is far more complete and vigorous. Per- 
haps this is because a woman's whole life can 
so thoroughly be mastered by the story of her 



114 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

heart, which plays only a part in the history of 
a man. More probably it is due to a funda- 
mental inability, common to all save a few rare 
spirits, to set down the most vital truths of 
nature. We love to say that romance is a 
thing of the past, because our own spirits are 
too dull to perceive it ; to insist that the instinc- 
tive spiritual recognitions, by which are cre- 
ated the unity of the spirit and the bond of 
peace, are but the idle vaporings of over- 
wrought brains; and to believe that the world 
in which 

the unfit 
Contrarious moods of men recoil away, 

To isolate pure spirits, and permit 
A place to stand and love in for a day, 
With darkness and the death-hour 
rounding it, 

is naught save vain fantasy and idyllic dream- 
ing. It may be so ; but it is more to be feared 
that we have lost the spiritual insight which 
keeps us in touch with the delicacies of feeling 
and opens our senses to the music of the 
spheres. 

But even the highest feeling may meet with 



"the silver iterance" 115 

frustration and failure in its hope. There is 
no more pitiful story than that of the ruin 
wrought by his marriage out of the stuff of 
Lydgate's life; and in the representation of 
this tragedy George Eliot reaches perhaps the 
highest level of realistic portraiture. For Lyd- 
gate is conceived as the type of the idealist 
whose vision of a world set free needs only the 
co-operation of a devoted woman to liberate 
it and translate it into action. At the time of 
his arrival at Middlemarch, 

Lydgate was but seventy-and-twenty, an 
age at which many men are quite common — 
at which they are hopeful of achievement, reso- 
lute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall 
never put a bit in their mouths and get astride 
their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they 
have anything to do with him, shall draw their 
chariot .... He was one of those rarer lads 
who early get a decided bent, and make up 
their minds that there is something particular 
in life which they would like to do for its own 
sake, and not because their fathers did it. 

Of Rosamond Vincy, the woman for whom 
Lydgate's love was awakened, we have already 



116 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

had occasion to speak. The story of the court- 
ship, the illusion and artifice by which it was 
carried on, and its ultimate end in marriage, 
are all told with tender and regretful clearness. 
That Lydgate was hurried into matrimony, al- 
though unconsciously, we know from indica- 
tions such as this: "When a man has seen the 
woman whom he would have chosen if he had 
intended to marry speedily, his remaining a 
bachelor will usually depend on her resolu- 
tion rather than on his." And then the tragedy 
begins : 

Between Lydgate and Rosamond there was 
that total missing of each other's mental track, 
which is too evidently possible even between 
persons who are continually thinking of each 
other. To Lydgate it seemed that he had been 
spending month after month in sacrificing 
more than half of his best intent and best pow- 
er to his tenderness for Rosamond, bearing 
her little claims and interruptions without im- 
patience, and, above all, bearing without be- 
trayal of bitterness to look through less and 
less of interfering illusion at the blank, unre- 
flecting surface her mind presented to his ar- 
dor which he had fancied that the ideal wife 



"the silver iterance" 117 

must somehow worship as sublime, though not 
in the least knowing why. But his endurance 
was mingled with a self -discontent which, if we 
know how to be candid, we shall confess to 
make more than half our bitterness under 
grievances, wife or husband included. It al- 
ways remains true that if we had been greater, 
circumstances would have been less strong 
against us. 

In this case the tragedy was not so much one 
of the externals of life but of the loss of the 
powers of mind and heart which are of greater 
value than all else. "For he was very misera- 
ble. Only those who know the supremacy of 
the intellectual life — the life which has a seed 
of ennobling thought and purpose within it — 
can understand the grief of one who falls from 
that serene activity into the absorbing, soul- 
wasting struggle with worldly annoyances." 
To such a struggle there could only be one out- 
come, and George Eliot's reflection contains 
the saddest recognition of the result ffl 

We are not afraid of telling over and over 
again how a man comes to fall in love with a 
woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally 



118 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

i 

parted from her. Is it due to the excess of 
poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary 
of describing what King James called a wom- 
an's "makdom and her fairness," never weary 
of listening to the twanging of the old Trouba- 
dour strings, and are comparatively uninter- 
ested in that other kind of "makdom and fair- 
ness" which must be wooed with industrious 
thought and patient renunciation of small de- 
sires? In the story of this passion, too, the 
development varies; sometimes it is the glori- 
ous marriage, sometimes frustration and final 
parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is 
wound up with that other passion, sung by the 
Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle- 
aged men who go about their vocations in a 
daily course determined for them in much the 
same way as the tie of their cravats, there is al- 
ways a good number who meant to shape their 
own deeds and alter the world a little. The 
story of their coming to be shapen after the av- 
erage, and fit to be packed by the gross, is 
hardly ever told, even in their consciousness; 
for perhaps their ardor for generous, unpaid 
toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of 
their youthful loves, till one day their earlier 
self walked like a ghost in its old home, and 
made the new furniture ghastly — nothing in 
the world more subtle than the process of their 
gradual change! In the beginning they in- 



"the silver iterance" 119 

haled it unknowingly : you and I may have sent 
some of our breath toward infecting them, 
when we uttered our conforming falsities, or 
drew our silly conclusions; or perhaps it came 
with the vibrations of a woman's eyes. 

This is what happened to Lydgate. In the 
reverse order, it was partly what Savonarola's 
influence saved Romola from — the negation 
of the higher self by baser demands. It is dis- 
couraging to contemplate such an end to hu- 
man endeavor and to human love. The old, 
ascetic ideal of celibacy were better than this 
gradual and insidious deterioration. It is 
worth while to notice the differences between 
these effects of unhappy marriage upon Lyd- 
gate and upon Romola. The last sentence of 
a previous citation indicates the point of ap- 
proach: "If we had been greater, circum- 
stances would have been less strong against us" 
Lydgate was not strong enough to withstand 
the continual pressure of his wife's pettiness 
and small-mindedness, and the bitterness which 
resulted from this made an additional factor 
in his destruction. The same bitterness, which 



120 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

led Romola to seek to evade her duties in flight, 
was met and overcome by Era Girolamo's pow- 
erful interference. But in her case the bitter- 
ness passed away in a higher self-renunciation 
than any which could have been achieved with- 
out the antecedent suffering. 

Truly regarded, this is the end of all sor- 
row — that it brings with it a higher sense of 
duties and a deeper fidelity to the ideal of serv- 
ice. That this was George Eliot's sense of it 
we may gather from the words which she put 
into the mouth of Savonarola, during the im- 
portant conversation just referred to: "Man 
cannot choose his duties. You may choose to 
forsake your duties, and choose not to have the 
sorrow which they bring. But you will go 
forth; and what will you find, my daughter? 
Sorrow without duty — bitter herbs, and no 
bread with them. If there is a cry of anguish, 
you, my daughter, because you know the mean- 
ing of that cry, should be there to still it . . . 
Sorrow has come to teach you a new worship." 

Too often we forget this in our rebellion 
against the laws or barriers that separate us 



"the silver iterance" 121 

from our desires. .When there grows up in us, 
as in Lydgate, a bitterness against fate and 
ourselves, we have lost the greater part of what 
makes for spiritual growth. Thereby we for- 
get that out of distress and suffering there 
comes a wisdom higher than ourselves, and 
one which we can attain in no other way. And 
out of this suffering comes patience, "and pa- 
tience worketh experience, and experience 
hope; and hope maketh not ashamed." 

Some such end is the goal of all George 
Eliot's love-stories, whether they be tragic or 
joyous. We are not allowed to forget the 
beauty and freshness and charm of human 
love ; but we are neither allowed to ignore the 
strength and sweetness which should come 
from love tested by tribulation. 

At the opposite extreme is love as Hardy 
knows it — the love which in its lowest forms is 
licentious, often, and brutal; which is mincing 
and artificial in its more common forms; and 
which, among those who should represent the 
highest phases of development, is either the 
torrential passion — "too like the lightning, 



122 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

which doth cease to be Ere one can say 'It light- 
ens/ " — or a bodiless creation, compact of 
metaphysics and sentiment. There is either a 
ruthless denial of the fleshly lusts, or an equally 
ruthless glorification of them. Swinburne's 
paradoxical chorus expresses the situation as 
well as words can: 

"We have seen thee, O Love, thou are 
fair; thou art goodly, O Love, 

Thy wings make light in the air as the 
wings of a dove. 

Thy feet are as winds that divide the 
stream of the sea; 

Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the gar- 
ment of thee. 

Thou art swift and subtle and blind as a 
flame of fire. 

Before thee the laughter, behind thee the 
tears of desire. 

And twain go forth beside thee, a man 
with a maid ; 

Her eyes are the eyes of a bride, whom de- 
light makes afraid; 

As the breath in the buds that stir is her 
bridal breath; — 

But Fate is the name of her, and his name 
is Death." 



"the silver iterance" 123 

Out of the disintegration of such loves there 
can spring no such spiritual poise and dignity 
as comes from the other forms. The result is 
necessarily passion, destruction, and death or 
dishonor. 

These loves impose no duties upon the lov- 
ers. Angel Clare sees no human duty to pre- 
vent his leaving Tess upon the discovery of her 
misfortune. The case is exactly parallel with 
Romola's determination to leave Tito ; but both 
the attempted flight and its result lead to op- 
posite ends. For Romola, after her second 
departure, returns to her duties as a patrician 
and a woman stronger and nobler than before, 
able to take up her share of the city's life, and 
to restore tranquillity and comfort to those 
whom her husband's misdeeds had wronged. 
Angel Clare is driven back to Tess by the ser- 
pent lashes of the Eumenides; chastened and 
broken in spirit, he returns to the woman upon 
whom his desertion had brought the bitterest 
fate known to womankind, only to see her 
ruin complete. Of his own blood-guiltiness he 
has no realization. It does not occur to him 



124» GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

that in her own person Tess prefigures the 
atonement of one for the sins of many. In 
slightly different fashion Sue Bridehead forces 
upon others the retribution which should justly 
overtake herself. The story of her marriage to 
Phillotson, her desertion of him, though by his 
permission, and her final rehabilitation by 
means of the formal legalism of a remarriage, 
is an instance of suffering which should have 
found its corrective in a sense of duty. The 
fact that Phillotson is a man of doubtful at- 
tractiveness, save of character, is not material. 
There is a curious description of him, which 
shows at once the crudity and the insight of 
Hardy's work: 

"I can mind the man," remarks the Widow 
Edlin of Phillotson, "I can mind the man very 
well. A very civil, honorable liver — but Lord 
— I don't want to wound your feelings — but— 
there be certain men here and there that no 
woman of any niceness can stomach. I should 
have said he was one." 

From this speech Sue retired in confusion, 
and Jude followed her in anxious solicitude. 

"I don't mind her roughness one bit." 



"the silver iterance" 125 

"What is it, then?" 

"It is that what she says is — is true!" 

That a woman, feeling this repulsion, as Sue 
did from the beginning, should nevertheless 
have consented to yoke herself for life with its 
object, is evidence of fundamental ignorance 
in the first instance; that, being free from him, 
any vague hope of reparation should force her 
back to him, even in the revulsion of feeling in- 
cident to such an event as the murder of her 
children by "Father Time," is indisputable 
proof of thoroughgoing ignorance of basic hu- 
man duties and privileges. 

The comparison between Romola and Sue is 
perhaps an apposite one in this connection. 
What Romola is brought to realize is the larger 
duty to an impersonal ideal which demands the 
subordination of her own personality, even to 
the extent of remaining with a man for whom 
her original love had given place to contempt. 
What Sue made the basis of her action was an 
individual rebellion against a situation which 
demanded all her gifts of mind and heart to 






126 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

overcome and ameliorate. Romola achieved 
the independence of her life; Sue was broken 
to the level of sordid subservience to the call of 
the flesh. 

It has always been difficult to understand 
the meaning of the pronouncement that "He 
who would save his life must lose it." In Ro- 
mola and Sue we have illustrations which show 
in some fashion the out-working of the para- 
dox. A positive duty is that which lies above 
and beyond the individual self -development. 
Hardy admits no such possibility; and there- 
fore his universe has nothing stable to which 
frail humanity may cling for safety. It is lit- 
tle wonder that the end is invariably tragedy 
and ironic mirth. 

There is another phase in which the differen- 
tiation between George Eliot and Hardy is 
especially strongly marked. This is in regard 
to their view of the voluntary nature of the 
affections. To Hardy the idea that it is possi- 
ble to set a watch over one's emotions is, on 
the face of it, preposterous. He does not ad- 
mit any self-control strong enough to combat 



"the silver iterance'' 127 

the instinct for sex, or any need for combating 
it either physically or emotionally. George 
Eliot's position we can judge; in Middle- 
march she makes this comment: "When a ten- 
der affection has been storing itself in us 
through many of our years, the idea that we 
could accept any exchange for it seems to be a 
cheapening of our lives. And we can set a 
watch over our emotions and our constancy as 
we can over other treasures." 

The point might be raised: Which of these 
two views holds the truest appreciation of the 
value of the affections? George Eliot's self- 
restrained, conservative feeling seems at first 
sight a more pedestrian emotion than that 
which Hardy portrays. It sounds more pro- 
saic, lacking in intensity, in enthusiasm, even in 
vitality as contrasted with Hardy's glowing, 
devouring flame. We are asked to judge upon 
the basis of the immediate effect, not by any 
tedious calculation of the result after laborious 
years. Of course there are many forms of love, 
and many expressions of it, ranging from the 
passionate cry "I charge you, O ye daughters 



128 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

of Jerusalem, by the roes, by the hinds of the 
field, that ye stir not up nor awaken my love 
until he please," to the no less intense but far 
more tranquil assurance: 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and 

height 
My soul can reach, when groping out of 

sight 
For the ends of being, and ideal grace. 

In Hardy, so easy is the transference of af- 
fection from one to another, among both men 
and women, that we are compelled to believe 
that the intense passion must be lacking in per- 
manence, if not in immediate strength. The 
love that gains in its intensity from community 
of interests, similarity of tastes, and congenial- 
ity, may be as intense as that which rests on 
physical allurements ; but no such basis for per- 
manence is shown or expected in Hardy's pic- 
tures. The love of Diggory Venn the reddle- 
man for Thomasin Yeobright, which comes 
nearest to the union of passionate intensity 
with sound intellectual comradeship, is none 
the less a variant upon the old theme, 



"the silver iterance" 129 

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace 
obtain. 

"The silver iterance" is spoken in many 
phrases 'and in many ways throughout the nov- 
els of Hardy and of George Eliot. It is al- 
ways a joyous thing to hear — "Is it due to an 
excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are 
never weary of listening to the twanging of 
the old Troubadour strings?" — and it is a 
theme whose freshness we should never be al- 
lowed to forget. But we may fairly ask that 
we be also reminded of that other qualifica- 
tion, that beside the continual repetition we 
may also know the love that lives in silence in 
the soul. Of these silences Hardy gives no 
glimpse. Among the men and women of mid- 
dle life who appear throughout his stories, 
there are none in whose stillness we can hear 
the echoes of that earlier iteration. The youth- 
ful love, be it never so furious, dies out leaving 
gray, cold ashes, without a spark which may 
kindle new fires. George Eliot, on the con- 
trary, though she shows so much less of the 
"silver iterance," has memorialized the silences. 



130 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

Between Amos Barton and Milly there existed 
the silent love; Sir Christopher kept this for 
Lady Cheverel; and Adam Bede's love for 
Dinah was a silent proof of the thing which 
stood beyond the realm of speech. These are 
but a few of many instances which might be 
cited ; but they serve to illustrate the tendency. 
They represent something more vital than the 
test of mere laborious time, for they deal with 
the inner guarded constancy which is a real 
treasure. 

We shall always love to listen to the "silver 
interance"; but it will continue to be the dis- 
tinction of only a few rare spirits to give ut- 
terance to the silence of the soul. 



VII 
THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 

ALMOST all of us have a fairly clear idea 
of "that which should accompany old 
age." Whatever the rank of society, the con- 
ception of "honor, love, obedience, troops of 
friends," shows but little variation. This does 
not mean that all portraits of old age are alike ; 
but it does mean a uniformity of feeling in re- 
gard to the place which age should occupy in 
the social order. In addition, it presupposes 
a certain background of relationships, past and 
present, which serve to limit and define charac- 
ter. This is perhaps the most interesting view 
of advancing years, as it is the simplest. 

The pictures of old age in Thomas Hardy 
and in George Eliot are especially rich in this 
interweaving of motives. The sentiment of 
parenthood is shown with especial charm. To 

131 



132 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HAEDY 

Hardy, for whom so few of the human rela- 
tions deserve reference, this receives uniformly 
sympathetic and deferential treatment. Of 
his studies of character none are more convinc- 
ing than those in which the unselfish devotion 
of father for daughter or mother for son is 
shown. George Eliot, with the same delicacy 
of feeling, none the less fails to present any 
such intensified portraits as the three in which 
Hardy reaches his greatest power. These 
three are striking instances. The devotion of 
Mrs. Yeobright to her son Clym; the love of 
Henchard for Elizabeth Jane; and the pas- 
sionate watchfulness of Melbury for Grace, 
are among the characterizations which we 
should not wish to lose. In this instance, at 
least, Hardy has abandoned the neuroticism 
which signalizes most of his work, and has set 
his artistic gifts at the service of a human 
theme of simple, sincere earnestness and dig- 
nity. 

The love of Henchard for his step-daughter 
is the central motive of The Mayor of Cas- 
terbridge. After a grim opening episode — 



THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 133 

the selling of his wife by Henchard in a fit of 
drunken despair — an interval of seventeen or 
eighteen years shows the wife seeking for her 
lost husband, and accompanied by her daugh- 
ter, presumably the same who was sold with 
her. The discovery of her husband in the per- 
son of the Mayor of Casterbridge, his single- 
minded anxiety to repair the wrong of earlier 
days, and the recognition of her child, are 
merely the setting for a larger drama. For it 
becomes known, through accident, that this is 
not his daughter, who had died in early child- 
hood, but another. The steps in his emotional 
development are worth tracing. 

Of Henchard himself we get an illuminat- 
ing suggestion in one brief sentence describ- 
ing his attitude toward bookkeeping and kin- 
dred necessities of a business career: "Hen- 
chard himself was mentally and physically 
unfit for grubbing subtleties from soiled pa- 
per; he had, in a modern sense, received the 
education of Achilles, and found penmanship 
a tantalizing art." He was the kind of man 
whose affections as well as his exactions might 



134 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HAKDY 

well prove tyrannical. Of the watch which 
he set over himself and his determination 
in whatever he undertook, a single instance 
will suffice: "He pressed on the preparation 
for his union, or rather reunion, with this pale 
creature in a dogged, unflinching spirit which 
did credit to his conscientiousness. Nobody 
would have conceived from his outward de- 
meanor that there was no amatory fire or 
pulse of romance acting as stimulant to the 
bustle going on in his gaunt, great house; 
nothing but three large resolves — one to make 
amends to his neglected Susan, another to 
provide a comfortable home for Elizabeth 
Jane under his paternal eye, and a third to 
castigate himself with the thorns which these 
restitutory acts brought in their train, among 
them the lowering of his dignity in public 
opinion by marrying so comparatively humble 
a woman." 

Of Elizabeth Jane it should be noted that 
she is one of the exceptional instances — al- 
most the only instance in Hardy— of a beau- 
tiful human character rising out of a welter 



THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 135 

of corrupting influences. With her heredity 
Hardy has no concern; he merely notes the 
unexplainable phenomenon — fortunately a less 
rare one than he would assume. It is not sur- 
prising that the discovery that this child was 
not his own should have produced a strong 
revulsion of feeling in Henchard; nor that 
under the influence of this feeling he should 
have treated her with coldness and a measure 
of injustice. Of his gradual return to his 
older feeling we get occasional glimpses. "He 
had liked the look of her face as she answered 
him from the stairs. There had been affec- 
tion in it ; and above all things what he desired 
now was affection from anything that was 
good and pure. She was not his own; yet, for 
the first time, he had a faint dream that he 
might get to like her as his own, if she would 
only continue to love him." 

In the misfortunes and reverses which be- 
set him, this desire for the affection of his 
step -daughter continued the one constant fac- 
tor in Henchard's life. "Shorn one by one of 
all other interests, his life seemed centering on 



136 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

the personality of this step -daughter whose 
presence but recently he could not endure." 
"In truth, a great change had come over him 
with regard to her, and he was developing the 
dream of a future lit by her filial presence, as 
though that way alone could happiness lie." 

The story of the frustration of this hope 
for happiness is reverently told — of Elizabeth 
Jane's own misunderstanding and misinter- 
pretation, of the attempted reconciliation and 
the misconception which sent Henchard away 
from the wedding feast with his peace-offering 
uncompleted. "He had not expressed to her 
any regrets or excuses for what he had done 
in the past, but it was a part of his nature to 
extenuate nothing, and live on as one of his 
own worst accusers." That the understand- 
ing and sympathy should come too late, is an 
irony on which Hardy does not dwell at any 
length — perhaps for that reason the more 
poignant. 

This is the history of a normal human rela- 
tion with normal incompleteness and imper- 
fection. It is refreshing, to say the least, in 



THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 137 

a wilderness of such monstrosities as Hardy 
best knows how to put together. Of equal 
charm is the recital of the devotion of Mel- 
bury, the timber merchant of Little Hintock, 
to the welfare of his only daughter — a devo- 
tion which includes elements not present in 
the story of Henchard and Elizabeth Jane. 
In the background stands an inconspicuous 
figure of a woman whose whole life was 
shaped and subordinated to this dominant af- 
fection. "Melbury, in dread lest the only 
woman who cared for the girl should be in- 
duced to leave her, had persuaded the mild 
Lucy to marry him. The arrangement, — for 
it was little more — had worked satisfactorily 
enough; Grace had thriven, and Melbury had 
not repented." 

The curious provincial union of simplicity 
and shrewdness is shown in Melbury in a 
number of phases. Not the least interesting 
is his attitude toward Dr. Fitzpiers : 

Melbury's respect for Fitzpiers was based 
less on his professional position, which was not 
much, than on the standing of his family in the 



138 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

county in by-gone days. That implicit faith 
in members of long-established families, as 
such, irrespective of their personal condition 
or character, which is still found among old- 
fashioned people in the rural districts, reached 
its full intensity in Melbury. His daughter's 
suitor was descended from a family he had 
heard of in his grandfather's time as being once 
great, a family which had conferred its name 
upon a neighboring village: how could there 
be anything amiss in this betrothal ? 

Melbury is pictured as a man of entirely 
sane and healthy morality, therefore the dis- 
covery of Fitzpiers' infidelity, which, in true 
Hardy fashion, is shown to be the result of 
traits in his nature not to be overruled or 
silenced, is a shock which affects his whole 
being. "He had a ghastly sense that he alone 
would be responsible for whatever unhappi- 
ness should be brought upon her for whom 
he almost solely lived, whom to retain under 
his roof he had faced the numerous inconven- 
iences involved in giving up the best part of 
his house to Fitzpiers. That Fitzpiers could 
allow himself to look on any other creature 



THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 139 

than Grace for a moment filled Melbury with 
grief and astonishment. In the pure and sim- 
ple life he had led it had scarcely occurred to 
him that after marriage a man might be faith- 
less." 

Of the change which this discovery brought 
about in Melbury's nature Hardy gives a 
penetrating and discriminating picture. In- 
deed, the whole characterization of Melbury, 
a man in whom he recognizes, in one of the 
rare cases, the existence of thoroughly normal 
passions and desires, of normal human loves 
and sympathies, is without flaw or blemish: 

The suspicion that his darling child was be- 
ing slighted wrought almost a miraculous 
change in Melbury's nature. No man so fur- 
tive for the time as the ingenuous countryman 
who finds that his ingenuousness has been 
abused. Melbury's heretofore confidential 
candor towards his gentlemanly son-in-law was 
displaced by a feline stealth that did injury to 
his every action, thought, and mood. He knew 
that a woman once given to a man for life 
took, as a rule, her lot as it came, and made the 
best of it, without external interference; but 
for the first time he asked himself why this so 



140 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

generally should be so. . . . Wisely, or un- 
wisely, and whatever other fathers did, he re- 
solved to fight his daughter's battle still. 

That he was never fully taken into his 
daughter's confidence as to the unhappiness of 
her married life is shown as an evidence of 
the acute sensitiveness developed by affection. 
"The insight which is bred of deep sympathy 
was never more finely exemplified than in this 
instance. Through her guarded manner he 
discerned the interior of Grace's life only too 
truly, hidden as were its incidents from every 
outer eye." This development, in a nature 
naturally unsuspecting and free from over- 
subtlety, is the reflection of one of the sunny 
phases of life which Hardy rarely pictures, 
and one for which we cannot be too grateful. 

The story of Mrs. Yeobright, and her pas- 
sionate devotion to her son Clym, culminating 
as it did in the tragic attempt to bring about 
that reconciliation which was eternally frus- 
trated by the guiltiness of Eustacia, presents 
a new aspect of the passion of parenthood. To 
understand this it is necessary to remember 



THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 141 

her peculiarities of manner and position. "She 
was a woman of middle age, with well formed 
features of the type usually found where per- 
spicacity is the chief quality enthroned within. 
At moments she seemed to be regarding issues 
from a Nebo denied to others around. She 
had something of an estranged mien; the soli- 
tude exhaled from the heath was concentrated 
in this face that had risen from it. The air 
with which she looked at the heathmen betok- 
ened a certain unconcern at their presence, or 
at what might be their opinions of her for 
walking in that lonely spot at such an hour, 
thus indirectly implying that in some respect 
or other they were not up to her level. The 
explanation lay in the fact that though her 
husband had been a small farmer, she herself 
was a curate's daughter, who had once dreamt 
of doing better things." 

These elements in her nature, which re- 
moved Mrs. Yeobright from the sphere of or- 
dinary Egdon farm-folk, made her peculiarly 
susceptible to the finer emotions and instincts 
which were a part of the natural inheritance 



142 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

of her son. "His theory and his wishes about 
devoting his future to teaching had made an 
impression on Mrs. Yeobright. Indeed, how 
could it be otherwise, when he was a part of 
her — where their discourses were as if carried 
on between the right and the left hands of the 
same body? He had despaired of reaching 
her by argument, and it was almost as a dis- 
covery to him that he could reach her by a 
magnetism which was as superior to words as 
words are to yells. Strangely enough, he be- 
gan to feel now that it would not be so hard 
to persuade her who was his best friend that 
comparative poverty was essentially the high- 
er course for him, as to reconcile to his feel- 
ings the act of persuading her." 

There follows a remarkable analysis of Mrs. 
Yeobright's character and perceptions — one 
which is unexcelled in vigor and understand- 
ing: 

She had a singular insight into his life, con- 
sidering that she had never mixed with it. 
There are instances of persons who without 
clear ideas of the things they criticize, have yet 



THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 143 

had clear ideas of the relations of those things. 
In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly 
women; they can watch a world which they 
never saw, and estimate forces which they have 
only heard. We call it intuition. . . . What 
was the great world to Mrs. Yeobright? A 
multitude whose tendencies could be perceived 
though not its essences. Communities were 
seen by her as from a distance; she saw them 
as we see the throngs which cover the canvases 
of Van Alsloot, and others of that school, vast 
masses of being, jostling, zigzagging, and pro- 
cessioning in definite directions, but whose fea- 
tures are indistinguishable by the very compre- 
hensiveness of the view. One could see that, as 
far as it had gone, her life was very complete 
on its reflective side. The philosophy of her 
nature, and its limitation by circumstances, was 
almost written in her movements. They had 
a majestic foundation, though they were far 
from being majestic; and they had a ground 
work of assurance, but they were not assured. 
As her once elastic walk had become deadened 
by time, so had her natural pride of life been 
hindered in its blooming by her necessities. 

The story of the attempt of such a woman 
to become reconciled to the alienation of her 
son's affections, and of her pathetic endeavor 



144 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

to make peace with her son's wife, is one of 
the most moving tales in Hardy's repertory. 
It is perfect in every detail. Even the six 
old-fashioned tea-cups, mute evidences of a 
peace-offering never completed, have their own 
characteristic message toward the appreciation 
of character. 

It is part of the irony which invests the or- 
der of the world in Hardy's eyes that the im- 
pression left in the mind of Clym is of her bit- 
terness and resentfulness at his supposed in- 
difference. The words spoken in grief and 
anguish to the little boy who last saw her 
conscious, representing as they did the reac- 
tion from a state of mind charged with 
emotional anxiety, were not true indices of 
her belief in her son ; yet it was inevitable that 
they should be so interpreted by her son, in 
his complete ignorance of both her motives 
and her desire. One is inevitably led to recol- 
lect the story of Lear and Cordelia, though 
the parallel is by no means exact. There is 
something in the emotional tension which sug- 
gests the mad old king, plucking "darnel and 



THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 145 

all the idle weeds that grow," and vainly 
struggling to persuade himself that his jewel 
still lives. It is in analyses like these that one 
realizes the vigor of Hardy's artistry and skill. 
This view of parental affection is a large 
one and a generous one withal. It is free 
from morbidness and from the taint of irreg- 
ularity which runs through so much of Har- 
dy's presentation of the human relations. Most 
worthy is the artistic skill which makes such 
delineation possible. George Eliot's point of 
view differs in its details and direction. She 
is less concerned with the actual phenomena 
of parental love than with the philosophy 
which defines and explains it. Her view is to 
this extent deeper, though less distinct. Of 
her understanding of the possibilities involved, 
a single passage from Adam Bede gives con- 
clusive evidence: 

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in 
it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits 
us together by bone and muscle, and divides us 
by the subtler web of our brains ; blends yearn- 
ing and repulsion, and ties us by our heart- 



146 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

strings to beings that jar us at every move- 
ment. We hear a voice with the very cadence 
of our own uttering thoughts we despise; we 
see eyes — ah, so like our mother's! — averted 
from us in cold alienation, and our last darling 
child startles us with the air and gestures of 
the sister we parted from in bitterness long 
years ago. 

A striking illustration of the truth of this 
commentary is found in the story of Mrs. 
Transome and her son Harold. It will be re- 
membered that this child, born of an unhappy 
intrigue, developed in time such abilities and 
physical traits as effectively proclaimed his 
paternity. To his mother's eye these were 
unmistakably plain from the first days of his 
return from his many years' sojourn in the 
Levant. Thus, in spite of her devoted love 
for him, he became a constant reminder to her 
of her infidelity. 

Of Mrs. Transome's feeling toward her 
son we learn much. For him she had been 
willing to make sacrifices and run risks which 
galled her pride in every way. She had forced 
herself to endure the presence of Matthew 






THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 147 

Jermyn, for whom her quondam passion had 
become the bitterest hatred, as his pettiness 
had made itself apparent ; and she had striven 
with all her might to preserve some traces of 
the family dignity for Harold. Yet there was 
a strain of loneliness and isolation in her life, 
about which George Eliot notes the following: 
"It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in 
the background, that mothers have a self larg- 
er than their maternity, and that when their 
sons have become taller than themselves, and 
are gone from them to college or into the 
world, there are wide spaces of their time 
which are not filled with praying for their 
boys, reading old letters, and envying yet 
blessing those who are attending to their 
shirt-buttons." 

Mrs. Transome's mother love is an illustra- 
tion of another principle formulated by 
George Eliot. "The mother's love is at first 
an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensi- 
bilities ; it is an expansion of the animal exist- 
ence ; it enlarges the imagined range for self to 
move in; but in after years it can only con- 



148 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

tinue to be joy on the same terms as other long- 
lived love — that is, by much suppression of 
self and power of living in the experience of 
another." 

The affection of Rufus Lyon for Esther, 
and of Silas Marner for Eppie are instances 
of other phases of parental feeling. In both 
of these cases the story is of the adoption of 
a child without claims of kinship, and its rear- 
ing to maturity. In both stories the resulting 
affection is one which rivals in intensity the 
sentiment of actual paternity. Indeed, in a 
sense it derives greater force from its volun- 
tary character, linking itself as it does with 
fundamental needs and affections. 

The increment of years may be suggested 
from these examples. To Hardy, age brings 
with it the consciousness of the inevitable su- 
perseding of the old by the new. Sometimes 
the perception of the changing order is accom- 
panied by the realization that "God fulfils 
Himself in many ways." More often it brings 
with it the cynical acquiescence in the changes 
which assigns only the lowest motives to hu- 



THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 149 

man action, which views with a leering toler- 
ance painful attempts at reconstruction or vis- 
its invective and vituperation upon innovators. 
Such a bitterness toward life George Eliot 
shows only in Mrs. Transome — a bitterness 
which is explained and accounted for by past 
misdeeds. From Mrs. Bulstrode, the wife of 
the dishonest Middlemarch banker, whose sin- 
cere affection for an unworthy man makes her 
strong and loyal in spite of public disgrace, 
to the sensitive, appealing figure of Rufus 
Lyon, with his nervous anxiety to expiate a 
fancied sin, and his charitable hope for all the 
world, the rule is that of increasing sympathy 
and tolerance for all the world. 

Curiously enough, Hardy gives no pictures 
of the old age which must succeed a youth 
such as that which he so frequently describes. 
We are given no means of observing the de- 
cadence and decline of characters like Damon 
.Wildeve and Eustacia Vye. If the explana- 
tion for this lies, as it may, in the belief that 
nature cannot allow the perpetuation of such 
characters and their reproduction, Hardy's 



150 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

view of life may be felt to hold at least one 
element of saving hope about it. Social sci- 
ence, to be sure, expresses a contrary doctrine ; 
but it is a doctrine which the larger philo- 
sophic view, which is properly the birth-right 
of the artist, might reasonably transcend. By 
a strange chance, it is the old age of Mrs. 
Transome, in Felix Holt, which shows more 
clearly the maturity of a completely Hardy- 
esque character. 

No discussion of such figures as these is 
complete without the mention of certain home- 
spun lives which are always thrust into the 
background of the tales, yet whose individuali- 
ties are marked enough to gain decisive recog- 
nition. Such an one is Denner, the faithful 
lady's maid to Mrs. Transome, whose tact is 
such as to conceal her intimate knowledge of 
family secrets, yet whose understanding cre- 
ates the only outlets for the surcharged emo- 
tion of her mistress — a woman whose long 
service has entitled her to presume upon her 
station, yet whose breeding never relaxes to 
allow her to do so. Sir Christopher Cheverel's 

ill 



THE INCREMENT OF YEARS 151 

old gardener, to whom in her distress of mind 
Caterina fled for refuge, is a similar portrait 
— lacking perhaps in the intimate knowledge 
which would make him completely sympa- 
thetic, yet seeking by every means in his power 
to soothe where he could not comprehend. 
More shadowy are the corresponding persons 
in Hardy's novels, as a rule, yet one recol- 
lects such a figure as the widow Edlin, of 
Jude the Obscure, crude, coarse and jarring 
as she is, as none the less a study of a gen- 
uine, and sincere, if unpleasant, type. So also 
is the case of Drusilla Fawley, with her crotch- 
ets and eccentricities, and her superstitious 
insistence that the Fawleys were never made 
for marriage. Old Dewy, his son Reuben, and 
the other members of the Mellstock choir, are 
delightful miniatures, perfect in their propor- 
tion and coloring. The Christmas waits of 
Egdon cannot be forgotten, so life-like are 
they in their fashion; the only comparison 
which one can make with them is with the stur- 
dy, glorious group of Athenian mechanicals, 



152 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

Snug the Joiner, Bottom the .Weaver, Starve- 
ling the Tailor, and their companions. 

It is a happiness that old age presents it- 
self in these colors and under this guise. And 
that Hardy and George Eliot should he at 
one in these details explains at least one curi- 
ous fact, that one of Hardy's earliest novels, 
published anonymously, should have been at- 
tributed to her. The euphemistic instinct 
which seeks to present the fairest aspect of 
the latter stages of life is a sound and healthy 
one, and one which modern literature has too 
often failed to respect. However warped and 
destructive may be his view of the waxing 
generation, Hardy loyally preserves the more 
gracious phases of the old. To that extent 
he is "Victorian," as was George Eliot. To 
that extent also he is truly realist, and inter- 
preter of human character and dignity. 



VIII 
RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 

INT the preceding essays we have examined 
the salient points of contrast between two 
representatives, one of a discarded social the- 
ory, the other of the tendencies which have 
become the main streams of social develop- 
ment within the past twenty-five years. Such 
a contrast would be merely curious and in- 
teresting, were it not for the conclusions which 
it forces upon us. The questions which it 
raises are not alone those issues of personal 
and individual life which make the frame- 
work of literary speculation, but the larger 
problems of social aims and social advances. 
We are faced with two views of life, vitally 
opposed to one another, not only in their the- 
ory but in their observation regarding human- 
kind. One of these has received the acclaim 

153 



154 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

of the new generation ; has been held to be the 
expression, exaggerated no doubt, yet in the 
main fair, of the type of individualism which 
should be allowed to govern the earth. The 
other has been discarded with other useless 
and cumbersome relics of a somewhat discred- 
itable intellectual past. Our modern cant dis- 
claims all mention of worth in a reactionary 
view of life; admits, with a smile and a shrug 
of self-complacency, that undoubtedly the re- 
actionaries of to-day were the reformers of the 
day before, but adds that its own advances 
have left even the laggards beyond reach of 
the older message. 

To those who think soberly and long, the 
question is not so readily answered. And the 
suggested lines of thought lead still farther 
afield, beyond the domain of literature and 
sociology, and into the abstract region of 
philosophical discussion. Eventually, the prob- 
lem is formulated: What is the essence of the 
radical position, and how does it differ from 
the reactionary ideal? 

In its broad aspects the distinction is essen- 



RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 155 

tially a simple one. The reactionary position is 
always the easiest of the two possible courses, 
while the radical attitude is instantly be- 
set with difficulties. This, however, does not 
tell the whole story, for it must further be re- 
membered that as radicalism and reaction are 
states of mind, not specific opinions, a view 
upon a given matter is not of necessity ger- 
mane. The veriest reactionary may none the 
less be far ahead of his generation, and the 
radical may appear to be one of its stragglers. 
For the reactionary, accepting as he does the 
easiest view of life that presents itself, may 
also hold the most advanced opinions of the 
day, by virtue of his very backwardness. We 
are familiar with persons who hold highly lib- 
eralized religious beliefs, by inheritance, as it 
were, not by reason of the intellectual pio- 
neering which alone entitles a man to the repu- 
tation for radical thought. The analogy holds 
in other departments of opinion equally. It 
will be observed, therefore, that there is no in- 
compatibility between the spirit of reaction 
and advanced opinion. On the other hand, 



156 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

a man of truly radical temper may consis- 
tently hold very conservative beliefs. By defi- 
nition the radical attitude is the difficult one — 
difficult because it involves not only indepen- 
dent study and conclusion, but the mainten- 
ance of this independence against any pres- 
sure. It is not radicalism to cry revolt and 
go your way, but it is radicalism to maintain 
the revolutionary fire against opposition and 
in the face of privation. Often the sincerest 
radical may hold the most conservative views. 
The radicalism which lacks the courage of its 
convictions, which balks at the logical actions 
resulting from its belief, does not properly de- 
serve the title. Much of this, however, is 
current among us by way of advanced thought, 
and arrogates to itself the privileges which be- 
long of right to that which appears more con- 
servative. 

The working conditions of life offer but a 
slight field for the practice of this false radi- 
calism, rather fortunately, on the whole, for 
it seldom happens that a man is given both 
the means to put his theories into operation 



RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 157 

and the theories for unlimited exploitation. 
He is obliged to take thought for the morrow, 
to consider what he shall eat and wherewith 
he shall be clothed, and it amounts almost to 
an instinct with him so to correlate his opin- 
ions and his circumstances that there shall be 
no fundamental clash. This is a simple mat- 
ter of expediency — it has nothing to do with 
his ideals of morality or justice, or his views 
of personal liberty. The reactionary allows 
this discrepancy to continue between his be- 
lief and his behavior without making an effort 
to change either, for this is the easiest solution 
of the whole matter. He will agree with you 
that the conditions of child-labor are shocking; 
but he will argue that such labor is necessary 
and cannot be abolished. He will cry "Peace, 
peace," and unhesitatingly devote himself to 
the profits that accrue from war. The radical, 
on the other hand, will at least be consistent 
so far as is humanly possible. He may be- 
come a fanatic, or impractical, but his intel- 
lectual position will be a clear-cut and decided 
one, whatever it may be. He will never con- 



158 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

tent himself with the world as it is, though 
the universe of his conception be but the most 
insane dreaming of a frenzied imagination. 
Such men make martyrs; but they also make 
leaders and pioneers. They are willing to 
stake everything they value upon the sound- 
ness of their conclusions — and though many, 
— even, perhaps, most, — fail, of those who 
succeed are the men who make history. 

Some such antithesis as this is perhaps a 
partial explanation of the Christian paradox, 
"I come to bring not peace, but a sword." 
For peace, as it has been crystallized in the 
comprehension of Christian dogmatists, is 
really a form of reaction — a stagnation of 
intellectual and spiritual faculties, an accept- 
ance of a status quo as both possible and ulti- 
mately desirable. The remoteness of the reali- 
zation of this dream does not affect the reac- 
tionary character of the intellectual position 
which makes it possible. Philosophically, it 
is true, it is possible to conceive an active and 
expanding peace which shall develop and in- 
sist upon the exercise of the radical and ardu- 



RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 159 

ous beliefs and convictions; but the figure of 
the sword is as yet the only one which carries 
with it the full virility and dynamic emphasis 
essential to right understanding. 

Certain limitations have always been im- 
posed upon the radical by the actual condi- 
tions of the world in which he lived. Some- 
times these are the limitations of temporary 
circumstances, removable by hard work and 
concerted action, though after a season of bit- 
ter travail and anguish. During such periods 
there are always the few, radicals in very 
truth, who must in some sense make atone- 
ment for the blindness of the multitude. And 
not infrequently the obstacles are of a more 
fundamental nature, remediable only in the 
latter stages of the world's progress. Those 
who see and guess these remoter issues are 
the mystics and poets, those who dream 
dreams and see visions, and who pay the heav- 
iest penalties for their insight. They can 
never hope for the glimpse into their Prom- 
ised Land, or see the end of the wilderness, 
and they must always bear the tormenting 



160 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

fear lest they be but followers of wandering 
fires. 

An author who seeks to expound a philos- 
ophy of life may choose in some measure the 
kind of world in which to give it expression. 
His philosophy can only be called radical in 
so far as it forces upon individuals the labori- 
ous courses of life, or reactionary in that it 
accepts the easiest view of human actions and 
human character. It is not necessary for lit- 
erature to do either of these things. It may 
aim merely at the realistic portrayal of life 
without comment or judgment. But when 
it does this it loses its distinctive quality. For 
literature is the only medium for the record 
of reflection. Painting and sculpture are pri- 
marily concerned with the bodily form of 
things, music with their atmosphere, if one 
may use such a phrase, — in literature only is 
there scope for the exercise of the rational 
powers alike of artist and audience. In the 
drama alone is this distinctive quality sus- 
pended; for in proportion as drama gains in 
representative force, it loses its literary qual- 



RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 161 

ity. We recognize a sharp distinction between 
"closet" and "acting" drama; and in our 
classical dramatic literature the practical test 
of excision, where circumstances require, shows 
all too clearly the essential alignment between 
the drama and the representative arts. For 
the "literary" passages, those of fine reflec- 
tion, or discriminating commentary, or sheer 
poetic fantasy, are those which must give way 
to the necessities of stage-manager and pro- 
ducing-agent. 

In this large sense the radical point of view 
of the two we have been contrasting is not 
that of Thomas Hardy, "advanced" though 
his theories may be, but that of George Eliot. 
For Hardy's view of life, in spite of the pre- 
vailingly tragic outcome which results in spe- 
cific cases, is an easy and simple one. Such 
and such are the human passions, irresistible 
and immutable ; though a man may see in this 
indulgence the destruction of his hopes and 
ideals, he has no choice but to obey. As a mat- 
ter of fact, he rarely looks far enough to be 
aware of the more distant consequences; nor 






162 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

does he care to do so. This fatalistic view is 
always the reactionary one, even though it 
may lead to brilliant achievements. Hardy's 
"radicalism" has no more justification than 
that which comes from a brutally outspoken 
and unreserved handling of themes of crude 
passion and cruder mentality. He is content 
to accept conditions as they are, protesting a 
little regretfully that they are so, but without 
so much as a theory of possible change. It is 
the philosophy of the Lotos-Eaters: 

Let us alone — what is it that will last? 
All things are taken from us, and become 
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. 
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 
To war with evil? Is there any peace 
In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 
All things have rest, and ripen toward the 

grave 
In silence — ripen, fall and cease; 
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or 

dreamful ease. 






The moral stamina which comes from a defi- 
nite, if difficult and unattainable, goal to- 



RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 163 

ward which endeavor may be directed, is ut- 
terly absent from this view of life. This fol- 
lowing of the instinctive emotional currents 
makes no appeal to the fundamentals of char- 
acter. 

For radicalism, to be real and permanent, 
must rest in the character behind the action. 
This is true of George Eliot. She supports 
the traditions because, although in certain re- 
spects (against which she protests unhesita- 
tingly) they are inadequate, yet they repre- 
sent a sound standard of life and of morality. 
Her agreement is of the radical sort which 
leads to progression, not the reactionary ac- 
ceptance of the gospel of things as they are. 
This intellectual position explains the appar- 
ent contradiction between her own theory and 
practice. Many people go no further than 
this, and condemn her for insincerity on no 
other or better grounds. They cannot realize 
that her revolt from convention was inspired 
by thorough respect for convention rather 
than contempt. In this the radical is distin- 
guished from the reactionary, who, because he 



164 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

is swept along on the surface currents of his 
time and his social group, conforms to its regu- 
lations as a part of his passive subjection to 
life rather than support them in vital agree- 
ment. 

It is true that radicalism is not always of 
this nature. Sometimes it is to be found in a 
sincere intellectual revolt against any and all 
the restraints of socialized existence — a re- 
volt which lacks nothing of the dynamism of 
that which we have been considering, but 
which is irreconcilably at variance with organ- 
ized society. Such revolutionary activity ac- 
complishes nothing except as it changes the 
spiritual temper of its contemporaries in the 
direction of a sincere repudiation of that which 
it has ceased to believe. Even with this un- 
certain achievement, it is not to be feared or 
to be despised, so long as its sincerity is past 
question. 

Judged by these standards the essential 
radicalism of George Eliot's position, even 
now, after a generation of upheaval and un- 
rest, is apparent. We have seen how her view 



RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 165 

of emerging womanhood compares favorably 
with the movements of the present day. To 
have anticipated the line of development in 
this particular is perhaps the most remarkable 
test of radicalism. We have always contrast- 
ed Western respect for womanhood with 
Eastern disregard, as we have contrasted An- 
glo-Saxon deference with Latin indifference. 
But in spite of this mark of supremacy as we 
describe it, we have tolerated conditions which 
have brought upon us the beginning of a 
great struggle whereof the end is not yet. It 
is inevitable that, in the development conse- 
quent upon such a struggle, many things for- 
merly considered essential will lose their value 
in our eyes. One possibility of change along 
unexpected lines is suggested by Bertrand 
Russell in the chapter of Why Men Fight 
which deals with the population question: 

The diminution of numbers, in all likelihood, 
will rectify itself in time through the elimina- 
tion of those characteristics which at present 
lead to a small birthrate. Men and women who 
can still believe the Catholic faith will have a 



166 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

biological advantage; gradually a race will 
grow up which will be impervious to the as- 
saults of reason, and will believe imperturba- 
bly that limitation of families leads to hell-fire. 
Women who have mental interests, who care 
about art or literature or politics, who desire 
a career or who value their liberty, will gradu- 
ally grow rarer, and be more and more re- 
placed by a placid maternal type which has no 
interests outside the home and no dislike of 
the burden of motherhood. This result, which 
ages of masculine domination have vainly 
striven to achieve, is likely to be the final out- 
come of women's emancipation and of their at- 
tempt to enter upon a wider sphere than that to 
which the jealousy of men confined them in the 
past. 

To steer a careful way between this danger, 
undoubtedly a real one, and those clearly- 
visualized evils which many years have shown, 
is an herculean task. The view of womanhood 
in its larger relations is one in which George 
Eliot has faced and analyzed both possibili- 
ties, and reached a practical mean. It is not 
unlikely that the conditions prevailing at the 
close of the war will make hers a more radical 



RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 167 

view than now; for with the emphasis upon 
repopulating the world which has already be- 
gun will come a consequent relaxation of mor- 
al standards, whose danger to men, great as 
that is, will be infinitely less than the danger 
to women caused by the growth of an attitude 
of moral and physical compliance by which 
alone can sterility be avoided. Only by some 
such intellectual realization as hers of the 
value of tradition and the possible reconcilia- 
tion between tradition and the newer freedom 
can the double menace be escaped. .We shall 
ultimately learn that the unregulated liberty 
which is the basis of Hardy's view of life is 
profound evidence of the easy-going laissez- 
faire spirit of reaction. 

One may ask, then, — What is the principle 
of authority which the radical recognizes? 
Clearly, it will not do to insist on tradition 
alone, however much we may rightly value 
the experience which tradition summarizes. 
Neither will it serve to say, as some have done, 
that a revival of the religious spirit will meet 
the need. A new religious awakening will 



168 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

never have the absolute authority which it 
might have had before the upbuilding of the 
modern critical spirit. It will undoubtedly 
gain, for it will have the loyal support of in- 
tellect and imagination alike; but its appeal 
will not be that of authority. The authorita- 
tive control must come from yet another 
source — the constant longing and active labor- 
ing for complete sincerity, intellectual and 
moral. A man whose intellectual integrity is 
unquestioned may be trusted with the upbuild- 
ing of a sound radicalism. 

The elements which go to develop this sin- 
cerity of character and outlook are essentially 
those which produce a sound literary realism, 
the truth to nature which critics and artists 
have struggled after for centuries. George 
Eliot represents this realistic tradition. It is 
easy to pass from this attitude toward life, es- 
sentially a rational and sincere one, to that 
which goes by the name of naturalism, by a 
simple exaggeration of details and a falsifica- 
tion of facts. This is typical of the school 
which Hardy represents. There is the same 



RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 169 

parallel between realism and naturalism that 
there is between authority and autocracy, be- 
tween self-defence and aggression, between 
discipline and subjection. The danger is that 
the lawful boundaries of each of these excel- 
lences may be overstepped, with the usual 
consequence of extreme action. It is by as- 
sociation with such extremes that people have 
been led to discredit what passes for radical- 
ism, never perceiving the differentiation be- 
tween the two. The modern emphasis is dis- 
tinctly one of extremes, in this as in larger 
matters. 

The same eccentric tendency is to be noted 
in the alternations of public feeling between 
moods of quasi-religious ecstasy and unex- 
ampled vindictiveness. Since the outbreak of 
the European War we have hailed the devel- 
opment of a new religious impulse — one which 
many observers feel to be a great gift of the 
conflict. Parallel with it is the strenuous en- 
deavor to stimulate and perpetuate national 
and individual hatreds as a divine necessity. 
No intermediate position receives just consid- 



170 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

eration. The radical attitude is that of a small 
group of pacifists in all countries whose posi- 
tion is summarized by Bertrand Russell: "The 
active pacifists, however, are not of this class: 
they are not men without impulsive force, but 
men in whom some impulse to which war is 
hostile is strong enough to overcome the im- 
pulses that lead to war. It is not the act of a 
passionless man to throw himself athwart the 
whole movement of the national life, to urge 
an outwardly hopeless cause, to incur oblo- 
quy and to resist the contagion of collective 
opinion. The impulse to avoid the hostility of 
public opinion is one of the strongest in hu- 
man nature, and can only be overcome by an 
unusual force of direct and uncalculating im- 
pulse; it is not cold reason alone that can 
prompt such an act." 

To us of the present, George Eliot is one 
of these advocates of what appears a lost 
cause. After a brief season of high esteem, 
she has lost prestige as a thinker, while retain- 
ing the doubtful glory of artistic achievement 
in an unfashionable style. She is not one of 



RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 171 

the reformers whose theories have become fact, 
and whose activity is therefore concluded, but 
one whose understanding and insight are so 
far ahead of those about her that even their 
clearness is doubted for more than a little 
time. The recognition accorded to such think- 
ers gives food for reflection. For it is among 
those who have unhesitatingly supported lost 
causes, or causes of the remote future, that 
intellectual sincerity, the guaranty of sound 
radicalism, is developed. There is then no 
question of personal gain or loss, but rather 
the broad philosophical antithesis of truth and 
falsity. It is possible to value a principle for 
its own sake, and apart from any results which 
may have bearing upon the individual exist- 
ence. 

And so we are brought back to our original 
distinction between radical and reactionary. 
An absolute contrast to the radicalism of 
George Eliot is the reactionary spirit of Har- 
dy and the naturalists of the present, whose 
principles follow the current rather than di- 
rect it. To insist on absolute liberty is easy; 



172 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HARDY 

and requires only constant iteration for be- 
lief. To look for the law which controls the 
liberties is the task of the genuine radical. 

In concluding such a detailed contrast as 
the foregoing, it is appropriate to formulate a 
definite opinion on the questions involved. We 
cannot fail to realize that the ideal of woman- 
hood which George Eliot seeks to show is 
that which must be developed as a possible 
compromise between the conflicting demands 
of the present. Such an ideal is not only ar- 
tistically but practically possible, and keeps 
a steady balance between the purely intellec- 
tual and wholly biological conceptions of the 
woman question. Neither of these can be ig- 
nored, but neither can be subordinated to the 
special development of the other. Fortu- 
nately, natural laws will tend to prevent the 
undue prevalence of the Hardy type of wo- 
manhood, which carries with it the seeds of 
its own destruction. Yet the recognition of 
any such view, even though it be of a cursory 
sort, tends to increase the tolerance of it, and 
may, in time, effect the decay of some more 






RADICAL AND REACTIONARY 173 

actively beneficial elements. A sane middle 
path will have to follow somewhat the lines 
which are herein suggested. 

The world will never be saved by theories 
alone. It will never allow its practices to be 
directed by theories, however sane or sensible 
they may be. The task of radical thinkers 
must be that of combining theory and prac J 
tice in such fashion that, though no practical 
end can be discerned immediately, it shall be 
easier to put the two together, until ultimately 
they coalesce. The radicals are the few who 
are able, not always or often to achieve the 
union of these two, but certainly to make it 
easier for others to follow out the well ap- 
pointed path. That this can be done is the 
record of the dreams of isolated radicals which 
have already become truths. The widest field 
for such growth is that of the written word; 
and the artist who combines, with his literary 
talent, the human gift and insight to give form 
to these radical and far-reaching conceptions, 
is he who can accomplish the most worthy and 



174 GEORGE ELIOT AND THOMAS HAEDY 

enduring good. To have attempted this is a 
tribute to the genius of George Eliot; and 
that her speech came to deaf ears does not de- 
tract from the force of its message. 



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